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

Granta just put a whole bunch of Sciascia back in print so I'm devouring those

Kazuo Ishiguro - The Buried Giant was calling out to me at the bookstore the other day... never read him before, nor did I realize he had a new book out, but I'm enjoying it so far (~100pp)

xps to j. -- Kora in Hell is good stuff; have you read In The American Grain? it's roughly contemporary with Kora & the other works collected in the Imaginations volume from NDP

Been a long time, but I really enjoyed The Portable William Carlos Williams, incl. an eerie scene from his novel White Mule.

Has anyone else read any Robert Bringhurst besides The Elements of Typographic Style? I've been immersed in The Tree of Meaning all spring, and have now moved onto its seemingly hippie-dippily-titled companion volume, Everywhere Being is Dancing. I think this guy is my favourite thinker; his paragraphs are just packed with incredible strength, both in style and content. He's like if Gary Snyder was a more rigorous thinker and rhetorician, really mind-blowing interdisciplinary stuff about literature, art, linguistic ecology, and our place in the world, both natural and cultural. I wonder if part of his low profile is because he has (and seems interested in) zero online presence. Anyhow, if you're at all interested in stuff, I'd recommend hunting down The Tree of Meaning.

And if anyone has read him, is there anything else you can recommend in this vein?

Philip Larkin - A Girl in Winter
C.S Lewis - Prince Caspian
George Simenon - Maigret and the Mad Woman

a bit long ago, bernard, but i seem to have misplaced my copy, through several years when i would have liked to take another look at it. williams' prose has always seemed a little inscrutable to me.

I finished A Far Cry from Kensington. This was not her best. It was probably the least engaging of any of her works I've read so far. But Dame Spark is a good enough writer that even her misses are not regrettable.

I'm not at all sure what I'll read next. Under such circumstances I often turn to essays or poetry for a short time.

ryan gattis, "all involved"

Phil Klay, Redeployment: short stories about life during wartime, mostly in Iraq, sometimes in the States. How to think about and not think about all kinds of shit, often bad, sometimes good, while not coming apart before you have to. How some people do all that, anyway. More on this book later, maybe.

I got involved with a 'popular science' non-fic book on neurology called How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. It has some of the usual weaknesses of science dumbed down for the general population, but it does give some high level overview and ventures to mention a few of the details; I'd say it's okay as far as it goes and moderately interesting.

Lehrer is a young guy and he sometimes uses an annoying tone of "oh gosh, we never knew any of this until just recently!!" when he's only drawing some fairly banal conclusions about human behavior that were already staple observations in folk tales and wisdom lit from millennia ago.

. . .

Lehrer featured a lot on the new and very good Jon Ronson book on shame--he was the famous plagiarist fired by the NYT

Has a very good bit on Lehrer's mea-culpa comeback speech that goes disastrously wrong. He gives it in front of a huger screen full of live tweets explaining what an arsehole he is.

Finished: Tanizaki - The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto's Mother. Great storyteling spun in The Reed Cutter, where three-way 'arrangement' happens very gradually against the watching eyes of a very conservative turn of the century Japan. V well paced. The latter needs more careful re-reading, switching POVs of seemingly first person narration to found diary, from straight realism to ghost stories, and a healthy dose of references to older Japanese literature and classical Chinese poetry I am not that familiar with.

Leskov's Tales: Lady Macbeth of mtsensk and Enchanted Wanderer are great. The 19th century personal canon grows a bit. He's thought of as fairly minor Russian writer but that is other people's problem.

The Existential Imagination - from de Sade to Sartre is fairly unique paperback. Stories that illustrate an approach to a codified philosophy (the first ed is from '63). Short stories and excerpts from Musil's MwQ and Brothers Karamazov. From the standpoint of arriving at this into the 21st cent its curious to see what has 'aged' and what has 'lasted'. The stories from Malraux and Sartre are weak and the stronger and fully in control ones are from the likes of Moravia and Pavese. Nice to read a short story by Brecht and Beckett although I think I'd need a collected set from either, especially the former. Kafka's story and control is bad news for Aichinger's The Bound Man which reads derivative of him despite being quite good.

Zielinski's story is the one jump to a surrealist mode that doesn't get enough of a hearing.

Which leads me to Ingeborg Bachmann's Three Paths to the Lake, which I am finishing. This is a different flavour of existentialism, taking place against the backdrop of hotels and Airports, where nature isn't thought of as anything much, where the job you end up looks good on the outside but is just another form of alienation and men - well, the least said about them the better, except that one person you need and want and no one else is enough - another source of pain. There is also bizarre jump off to history (the story of old Vienna), a lot of plates are spun.

After reading deeper into Lehrer's book, my suspicion is that Lehrer was smart to plagiarize, because he's not a very sharp thinker or talented writer. Still "plagiarized" doesn't equate to "factually wrong", so I may press on and derive what I can from what is still an interesting subject.

i am reading DIVISION TWO of BEING AND TIME, brb gonna temporalize some shit

i need to read a novel, maybe bookmarking this thread will motivate me

hello! i am not reading. i am with forks on bookmarking. but i would like to read nonfiction.

Nonfiction's a pretty wide category. I'm gonna recommend Robert Bringhurst's The Tree of Meaning, just so I can have someone else's take on it.

In xpost Phil Klay's Redeployment, a Marine speaks goes to see the chaplain, and strongly implies that his company is doing bad shit. The priest reports it (this isn't confession, so no confidentiality) and is told by the most responsive and responsible person in the chain of command to forget implications, and anyway this company is having its opportunities to do bad shit reduced, and that the dangerously traumatized company commander will be shipped, just as soon as the company's deployment ends. Meanwhile, it is a war, after all, so such a company isn't the worst thing to have handy.

The Marine comes back to talk to the chaplain several times. After one such visit,
The conversation stayed with me well after Rodriguez had gone. "You're a priest," he'd said. "What can you do?" I didn't know.
As a young priest, I'd had a father scream at me once. I was working in a hospital. He'd just lost his son. I thought my collar gave me the right to speak, so right after the doctors called time of death, I went and assured him his infant son was in paradise. Stupid...But platitudes are most appealing when they're least appropriate...It was disgusting. It was vile.
....The father had despaired, but at least he was looking at life head-on, stripped of the illusion that faith, or prayer, or goodness, or decency, or the divine order of the cosmos, would allow the cup to pass. It's a prerequisite, in my thinking, to any serious consideration of religion. What, like St. Augustine, can we say after Rome has been sacked? Except Augustine's answer, the City of God, is a comfort designed for the aftermath of a tragedy. Rodriguez, that lance corporal, Charlie Company, the whole battalion, they were a different matter. How do you spiritually to men who are still being assaulted? So that they will stop murdering Iraqis, for instance? If that is what they are in fact doing. The priest keeps trying to talk himself into giving them the benefit of a doubt, but the effort has the opposite effect: he knows himself too well.

spiritually *minister*, that is; sorry.

Leskov's Tales: Lady Macbeth of mtsensk and Enchanted Wanderer are great. The 19th century personal canon grows a bit. He's thought of as fairly minor Russian writer but that is other people's problem.

i think, after some initial wariness with Lady Macbeth, Leskov is amazing - the one about the icon painters is amazing as well. but yes, The Enchanted Wanderer is something else - wonderful mixture of weird mysticism, eastern christianity and documentary realism. the hypnotism bit is remarkable iirr as is when he has thorns sewn into the heels of his feet to stop him escaping.

basically i read the first three stories plus a couple of others in the selection I've got, then felt mildly overwhelmed with the intensity of my thoughts about them, gave myself a break (felt a bit like when you don't listen to an album all at once because you're enjoying the experience of discovering it so much) and haven't returned. need to do so.

Has anyone else read any Robert Bringhurst besides The Elements of Typographic Style?

i have read it, yes. not sure I've read anything in exactly the same vein, but there must be all sorts of textbooks on typography out there, plus a few decent websites (ion a train atm so can't find details).

You might want to try Simon Loxley's Type: The Secret History of Letters. which had a lot of interesting stuff in, though I'm not an expert so can't tell you how frighteningly authoritative it is.

still reading the seven who fled but been travelling a lot recently so tend to take my ipad and read kindle stuff.

picked William Gibson's the peripheral off my queued books - i really liked Pattern Recognition.

But f' me he really makes you work to orient yourself. book immerses you right in a load of future impedimenta immediately without any gloss. defamiliarisation is clearly the point but the settings are tuned way up high so you spend much of your time trying to work out what the words refer to and then what the things they refer to are and if they're important or just domestic items he wanted to drop some future defamiliarity on.

x2 as well, as these are two futures he's writing.

i think there's something else here as well, which is his focus on present day cutting edge (drones, oculus rift etc) makes his vision a bit encumbered. i give not one fuck about how predictive SF is - a curiously persistent low-level critical assumption of worth - but it can jolt the aesthetic of reading about a speculated future when the author's angling too much on Mashable new product reports.

Xpost: After reading Elements, I don't think I need any more typography in my life. I've been reading his essays and speeches, collected in The Tree of Meaning and Everywhere Being is Dancing, which treat pretty big questions of linguistic and cultural ecology, the place of oral literature in the broader literary ecosystem, and how things mean whether we perceive it or not. Pretty heady stuff, and I'm really digging it. (The introduction to A Story as Sharp as a Knife deals with a lot of the same questions.)

The only other writer I've read who takes a similar tack (though as a farmer and not an ethnolinguist he has a different focus) is Wendell Berry. I read a lot of that stuff some years ago & remember being turned off by how cranky he became in his later books.

Bringhurst seems like the kind of writer that if you read him, you'd become a better human, whether you agree with any of his conclusions or not. I've forced it on some friends and it hasn't grabbed any of them significantly, so it's probably just a quirk of my brain that makes me think he's so damn great.

I'm reading the new Neal Stephenson.

I've forced it on some friends and it hasn't grabbed any of them significantly, so it's probably just a quirk of my brain that makes me think he's so damn great.

they're probably just bad humans and you shd cut them out of your life without explanation.

The Enchanted Wanderer is something else - wonderful mixture of weird mysticism, eastern christianity and documentary realism. the hypnotism bit is remarkable iirr as is when he has thorns sewn into the heels of his feet to stop him escaping.

One thing about #19thcentcanon is I'm trying to put together a list of novellas for ILB poll. Have found some great ones like Enchanted Wanderer in the last six months. Others were: Lenz, Michael Kohlhaas, Sylvie. Want to re-read some Poe to select one from him.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Are you only polling novellas from the 19th century, xyzzz___, or can it be more unwieldy than that?

finishing up Brothers And Sisters by Ivy Compton-Burnett. which i've already read before. and which i wouldn't recommend to anyone other than another Ivy Compton-Burnett fan. which means you would have probably had to have read this book already for me to recommend it to you.

then i'm gonna read The Game-Players Of Titan. which i have never read.

this is my favorite part of the review joyce carol oates wrote in 1984 of an ICB bio:

"She never married, had no love affairs or children, kept no diary or journal, wrote surprisingly few letters throughout her long life , belonged to no political organizations, ventured no public pronouncements, wrote no literary criticism and was involved in no scandals, literary or otherwise. When she died at the age of 85, in 1969, her personal papers filled only half a shoebox - and were not very personal at that."

not read any compton-burnett but have been meaning to read that, which i have lying around... somewhere.

ICB is a trip: perfectly clipped phrases,,tossed or dropped in passing. What they add up to can involve double-takes, but there it is, you got it. *Maybe* like Henry Green, a bit, but she seems to specialize in family life? Judging by what I've read; it's at least one of her great subjects, anyway.

I like this essay on Compton-Burnett's style, although since it was written by a friend of mine, I can't pretend to be objective about it: http://www.academia.edu/4769684/Ivy_Compton-Burnetts_Small_Economies

I've been meaning to read Compton-Burnett for a while now, mostly on the basis of that friend's enthusiasm and because I tend to be impressed with writers (such as Gaddis and Green) who are able to foreground dialogue as radically as she's reputed to.

Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Donna Tartt - The Little Friend
Ben McIntyre - A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby And The Great Betrayal
Zachary Leader- The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame And Fortune 1915-1964

anna karenina!

Are you only polling novellas from the 19th century, xyzzz___, or can it be more unwieldy than that?

― one way street, Tuesday, 2 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It can be but I wonder if I put in Kafka's Metamorphosis that would just walk it wouldn't it?

I had a German only sideline that would be feature Kafka, Von Kleist, Mann's Death In Venice and Lenz. Maybe its just me but Kafka would also walk that so I switched to 19th century.

What else were you thinking of? Anything from earlier periods would be good too.

love this line from ICB's Brothers And Sisters. sums her up pretty good:

"What is it? What are you all talking about?" said Sophia, coming into the room, her eyes at once apprehensive lest the talk might be about herself, and holding resentment ready in case it were not."

5.There’s an essay where [John Waters] writes about his favourite books, or, as he calls it, Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life if Something is Basically the Matter With You. They are Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Darkness and Day.

In Youth is Pleasure is great, but p esoteric. Interesting to draw a line through those. ICB and DW are a good pairing.

i really don't know what kind of nonfiction i want to read. not necessarily a bio. maybe something about a certain industry. i really need to give it some thought.

feel bad sometimes that i love The Man Who Loved Children so much that no other Stead comes close for me. feel the same way kinda about Paula Fox. once you read Desperate Characters everything else gets measured against it. (i'm also waiting to read the Penelope Fitzgerald book that can compare to The Bookshop...haven't read them all yet.) man, there is a bleak Lit class for you. have everyone read those and throw in The Easter Parade by Richard Yates while you're at it. major bummer...

tomás gonzález, "in the beginning was the sea"

Are you only polling novellas from the 19th century, xyzzz___, or can it be more unwieldy than that?
― one way street, Tuesday, 2 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It can be but I wonder if I put in Kafka's Metamorphosis that would just walk it wouldn't it?
I had a German only sideline that would be feature Kafka, Von Kleist, Mann's Death In Venice and Lenz. Maybe its just me but Kafka would also walk that so I switched to 19th century.
What else were you thinking of? Anything from earlier periods would be good too.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 5:57 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A few earlier works that come to mind are Behn's Oronooko, Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler, Candide, Cervantes's Dialogue of the Dogs, Rameau's Nephew, Philosophy in the Boudoir, and Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, although maybe that assumes too flexible a definition of the novella. I was mostly thinking of twentieth century texts (e.g. The Beast in the Jungle, Heart of Darkness, Miss Lonelyhearts), Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, Hedayat's The Blind Owl, Platonov's Soul, Fitzgerald's May Day, Stein's Melanctha, Delany's The Star Pit, David Foster Wallace's The Sufferering Channel, Faulkner's Old Man, or Gass's The Pedersen Kid, among others), but I'd be fine with sticking to the nineteenth century and earlier.

Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul

i seem to be reading 'negative dialectics', we'll see if that's true next week still

i found it surprisingly easy to get through (if not always easy to understand)--i may have been in a weird mental space.