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

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.

yeah i've read lots of it, just seeming like the time for a serious read now. it seems to be the least unreadable of all his later work. i think the main source of difficulty is the allusiveness and the constant irony. but the conceptual space is smaller and the work is less substantive (like he admits at the outset), so familiarity w/ the philosophical tradition alleviates a lot of that difficulty. in contrast to 'aesthetic theory', which has just got way too much shit goin on for the prose to be the same kind of breeze.

I finished How We Decide. It had some interesting and suggestive tidbits to share, but as with many recent books on neuroscience, it far oversold the idea that a pile of suggestive tidbits could be coherently applied to ordinary and practical use, as a guide to behavior.

Its greatest value was to emphasize first that human brains are far more active and complex below the level of consciousness than we are ever consciously aware of, and secondly that emotions are as much a form of thought as our interior monologue and are generally accomplishing very useful work.

I am reading Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad. I returned C by Tom McCarthy. I got through the part that was sort of like Magic Mountain but not through the Great War. It was too much of a slog. I couldn't finish.

reading going clear by lawrence wright, which for the record is much better/more nuanced than the documentary although the doc is def good

Philip Roth - "I Married A Communist"
Gilles Deleuze - "The Time-Image"

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.

Don't know if this appeals, but I just read Margaret Lazarus Dean's 'Leaving Orbit: The Last Days of AMerican Spaceflight', a wonderful look at the effective end of the US manned space program.

Weirdly, the last 3 books I read all featured NASA's stunning Vehicle Assembly Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Assembly_Building)

The other two books were Ian Sales 'All that Outer Space Allows', an alternate=history SF novel about feminist SF writing and the Apollo program, and The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter, a decaying US satire with some lovely writing but which didn't quite cohere fully

Don't know if this appeals, but I just read Margaret Lazarus Dean's 'Leaving Orbit: The Last Days of AMerican Spaceflight', a wonderful look at the effective end of the US manned space program.
This sounds great, thanks!

The other two books were Ian Sales 'All that Outer Space Allows'
Wait, is this the final Apollo Quartet book? Did it just come out?

Oh I see, April 27. I slept on it for a month. Now he's starting a new Space Opera thingie. We'll see.

Toying with idea of starting standalone thread for Station Eleven but wonder how far it will get, what with the cold equations of ILB.

just read it, so

Finished Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", a bit dry in style but thought-provoking. Now reading John K. Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" - if nothing else, he's a much more stylish writer.

Galbraith was easily the best stylist economics ever produced. Not too shabby as a thinker, either.

one way street - I love lost of those 20th century recommends but it'll probbaly be spreading it too thin (anything more than 5-10 will do that due to the small size of ILB, and even then depends on whether it interests anybody.)

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.

gotta say I totally forgot Rasselas and Candide, as I don't like either of them. Haven't read any of the others although no doubt I'd add De Sade (whom I've been reading recently).

More great recommends I'll add everything here whenever I get round to doing it.

Okay, went ahead and started Station Eleven, By Emily St. John Mandel, a Standalone ILB Thread. Not much to it yet.

i will always read odd stories published in the 60's by women i have never heard of. as a rule. zero information on her on the web. though its nice to know all these years later that you can still buy first - and only - editions of this book from the eakins press website.

https://scontent-atl1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1/v/t1.0-9/11133745_10153847899852137_124843256554506580_n.jpg?oh=e3b1b8e1cc12c778cbde298733b89f1a&oe=5605E892

so I've now finished the Ishiguro, but before I move on to Satantango I'm going on a Cesar Aira mini-binge.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter made for a pleasant single-sitting read at a cafe over the weekend (special thanks to my telepathic mother, who phoned me two minutes after I had closed the book), & I think I'll try to repeat the experience next weekend with a reread of The Literary Conference (emboldened by the fact that lightning literally strikes the same place twice in one of these novels)

meanwhile, I'm savoring every new plot development in his comparatively sprawling (140 pp!) noir novel Shantytown

Georges Simenon - Dirty Snow
Michaelangelo Matos - The Underground is Massive
Barney Frank - Frank
John Ashbery - Your Name Here

shouldn't that be

John Ashbery - Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

then

Tom Spanbauer, I Loved You More

shouldn't that be

John Ashbery - Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

then

― j., Thursday, June 4, 2015 12:40 PM

DON: Well, yeah.

Sei Shōnagon is so good. I love all of the list entries.

126. Things That Should Be Large

Priests. Fruit. Houses. Provision bags. Inksticks for inkstones.

Men's eyes: when they are too narrow, they look feminine. On the other hand, if they were as large as metal bowls, I should find them rather frightening.

Round braziers. Winter cherries. Pine trees. The petals of yellow roses.

Horses as well as oxen should be large.

127. Things That Should Be Short

A piece of thread when one wants to sew something in a hurry.

A lamp stand.

The hair of a woman of the lower classes should be neat and short.

The speech of a young girl.

So, speaking of novels in dialogue, like Burnett and Green, the library shop suddenly has a big shiny hard copy of A Frolic of His Own, but seems like some ILBers found it disappointing, compared to Gaddis' previous. The Times reviewer, despite caveats, has just the opposite take. Almost all of its many blurbs either reference his earlier works or just generally praise his style etc. On the other hand, it did win the 1994 National Book Award.
I would just buy the damn thing, since it's very cheap, but running out of room, so have to picky. What do yall think of it?

I haven't read any other Gaddis fiction.

It's definitely worth reading, but I wouldn't start with it--the pacing seems slacker and the satire more monotonous than was the case with his earlier work. If you're put off by the length and difficulty of the earlier novels, try Carpenter's Gothic.