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

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