The Decline and Fall 2016 of gILBert the fILBert: What Are You Reading Now?

A successor to Spring and All 2k16 / what are you reading now?

I'm nearing the end of 1493, Charles Mann. He's done an excellent job of digging up little-known and under-appreciated pieces of history regarding the transactions between Europe, America, Africa and Asia in the century or two following the establishment of European colonies in the western hemisphere.

For example, he repeatedly emphasizes that for several centuries, from roughly 1500 to 1800, there were more people of African descent than Europeans in the Americas. Often five to seven times as many, and due to many successful escapes and revolts, and to a lesser extent manumissions, large numbers of African-Americans were not slaves. In Brazil, escaped slaves created a small independent empire called Palmares that lasted a century before it was conquered and destroyed.

Anyway, an informative book.

I'm still reading old magazines. I can't stop reading them. Encounter magazine from the 60's might be my fave. great essays. and poetry too. the essays making me want to read things i've never read. finished a cool essay about the industrial revolution and a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court. which i've never actually read. i even read a great essay about the charterhouse of parma that made me want to read THAT. lord knows when i ever will though. read a fun essay by kingsley amis about his time teaching at cambridge. everyone thought he was gay because he spent so much time hanging out drinking with students in pubs.

and when i'm done with those i have about 50 original newsprint copies of the new york times book review i want to dig into that are from the height of the depression. so many books reviewed in those that are lost to time.

i don't know why the Twain and i never meet. so much stuff of his i haven't read.

Came to thread to notify ilxor wins that he has the rest of the day to order audiobook of Simon Vance reading complete Sherlock Holmes for $4.95, I think.

Robert Caro's LBJ bios

also Joby Warrick's "Black Flags: the Rise of Isis" but honestly I had to stop reading because it was just making me so angry, all the Bush admin idiocy. Idly re-reading Moorcock's Pyat quartet, which is a total joy.

About half way through Groucho and Me which is pretty good. Less wise cracky than I feared.

About 30 pages from end of book on Grateful dead that's skipped a lot so not been the best.

I've been reading Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai (which is idiosyncratic and delightful and fairly subtle in how it keeps moving around Sibylla's preoccupation with the problem of suicide; I loved Lightning Rods, so I don't know why it's taken me so long to come around to this novel), Kevin Barry's short stories in Dark Lies the Island after James Morrison's recommendation in the last thread (Barry's subject matter is a little conventional and his focus on pathologies of masculinity occasionally wearying, but I like the mercurial quality of his style), Yuri Herrera's bleak and dimly lit Signs Preceding the End of the World, probably too many X-men books of varying quality, Tom King's unsettling and strangely moving comics series The Vision, and Ivone Margulies's study of Chantal Akerman's work, Nothing Happens, which is as dry as a dissertation (which it originally was) but is probably the most perceptive and thorough book we'll have on Akerman for the near future.

I read The Last Samurai this summer and loved it.

Currently in the relatively active pile:

Letters from Russia, Astolphe de Custine, an 1839 travelogue of Imperial Russia, referenced in Franz Nicolay's The Humorless Ladies of Border Control which I read this summer
Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel, quiet little grotesques that I don't know how to feel about, in attractive Pushkin Press edition
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, JL Mackie, an originating work of moral error theory, a metaethical framework I find appealing

A Rebours, by Huysman, which I'm sorry to ay is a little more of a bore than I thoguht it would be, but you just need to accept its aesthetic i suppose

Galileo's Finger by Peter Atkins

Better Never To Have Been, by David Benatar, in which he argues for anti-natalism and voluntary extinction

Been reading in chunks of stuff for a good month. This week: 70 pages of Crime and Punishment while waiting at the hospital (its great), Petrarch's Canzionere, Speaking of Siva (ancient Indian devotional poetry, actually making my way through the detailed intro). Now going to read Kipling's The Eyes of Allah

Its getting chillier this weekend so hope to finish some more soon and get some concentration.

quiet little grotesques that I don't know how to feel about

nor did babel imo

I'm not ready for Lispector's Complete Stories, so where should I start? Think I'd like some of hers.

If you haven't read any Lispector, I'd start with the last novel she published in her lifetime, The Hour of the Star; if you're interested in her work in short forms, I'd start with her story collection Family Ties (which you can find either in the Collected Stories or as a separate volume) or her brief, quirky newspaper essays and sketches in Selected Cronicas.

*Complete Stories, rather

Thanks---Lispector and Dewitt, soon, soon (trying to budget, but)

Short Stories isn't the ideal start but if you have that to hand have a read of "Egg and Chicken", best short story I am likely to read all year.

you can also sometimes find that in collections of elizabeth bishop's writing--she did a few lovely translations of lispector stories

Started Walter Benjamin's THE STORYTELLER collection which was kindly given to me by ilx poster CONRAD.

Just read Barrington Bayley's The Fall of Chronopolis. mind=blown. May post more on the SF thread.

I kept picking up and putting down a copy of his gateway omnibus. Sounds as though i need to commit.

khlebnikov: the king of time

Just read Barrington Bayley's The Fall of Chronopolis. mind=blown. May post more on the SF thread.

please do - I think I've only read "The Four Colour Problem"...? never thought to track down his novels or other collections before, but the praise from others in his wiki entry make me curious

Done.

you can also sometimes find that in collections of elizabeth bishop's writing--she did a few lovely translations of lispector stories

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Monday, 3 October 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'll need to get that, I'd rather have a curated collection of Lispector shorts..

I have been ill in bed with a chest infection, reading Voices from Chernobyl today. It is reasonable to expect some very uncomfortable reading about people dying from radiation sickness, but nothing prepares for some of the older interviewees talking about the bestial cruelty + casual genocide occuring during the war. I like first hand accounts of history a lot though, and will read all the rest of Alexievich's books on the strength of this one.

nor did babel imo

The feeling I get from the Red Cavalry stories is more of a sensation of emotional numbness - like he saw so much horrible shit that he kind of couldn't remember how he was supposed to feel about it - and maybe didn't really want to try. There's also a feeling akin to gallows humor, but less funny - more like a cynicism that bleeds into machismo - as if to say: this is the way the world is and it doesn't matter how you feel about it.

a cynicism that bleeds into machismo

yeah the stories are largely about machismo, i think? like a subtler and more conflicted hemingway maybe. sloppy thoughts: there's also a friction between the revolutionary harshness in whose necessity babel/"babel" genuinely believes, and the empathy/revulsion he can't purge. but over the course of the cycle, as it becomes clearer that the polish war might be just another cossack rampage[*] (which implies that he might be just another jew, and a traitor no less) this friction is in a weird, sad way resolved?

thinking of the difference between "my first goose", where the mundane violence babel's squadmates initiate him into (overriding his "creampuff" intellectuallism, which is also his jewishness) blurs into the rhetorical violence of lenin's words (this time enabled by the creampuffery because babel is the only one who can read them); and the one where he argues with the old man in the pawn shop, who recognizes no difference between the revolution and the counterrevolution. babel's character still believes in the revolution of course but the contrast in the latter story (between idealized+real violence) is plainly sad whereas the unity in the former (between same) seems to me full of cloudy dread (even though it is superficially a coming-of-age story w a triumphant ending)

highly recommend the diaries if you have em? same experiences but filtered neither thru politics nor aesthetics. not better or anything just illuminating. the arc from true believer to numb cynic is much clearer, blunter. and once it reaches the latter it's the bleakest thing you've ever read: "soon we will die. man's brutality is indestructible."

also recommend his odessa plays because those are actually fun for a change.

[* this is not really fair, btw, at least not ethnographically. the konarmiia was mostly peasants; most of the cossacks were not reds as they had been a privileged class under the tsars. babel iirc calls all the soldiers "cossacks", even in the diaries, so the word becomes a projected macho unjewish ideal, admired+feared, attractive+repulsive. however "rampage" is definitely fair.]

halfway through murakami's "what i talk about when i talk about running" (readable but really slight, regret spending money on this rather than getting it from the library, feels sort of like if murakami had a livejournal). just started mark landler's "alter egos" (book by NYT reporter on obama/clinton relationship and foreign policy goals, overall excellent, but keep putting it down b/c it's hard to sustain interest in this after a day of reading news articles about the election). kind of in that depressing phase where i really really want to get the books i'm reading over with so i can get on to something else.

oh hey j.d. i'm reading jonathan schell's the time of illusion on some ancient archived recommendation of yours; finding it totally pellucid so thanks. keep reading bits out loud for pleasure.

At some point in his first two years of office, the President had apparently had one of the most irresistible and irreversible experiences the human mind can undergo. He had been struck by a vision of the world that seemed to bring it all together, into a single pattern. He had concluded that a wide array of apparently disparate evils were branches of one large evil...

lovely accidental pre-echo for me here of the line from the shining i'm obsessed w as metaphor for basically any mental breakage or possession: at some point, over the winter...

mostly narratology, genette, cohn, a bit of the first chapters of novels as parallel research, so i did 'portrait of the artist', 'effi briest', 'the magic mountain', 'for whom the bell tolls', 'gil blas', 'manon lescaut', 'jealousy' (robbe-grillet), i dunno, just reading around

hey glad to hear it DLH -- i've never picked up anything else by schell but that book sticks in my mind. can't quite describe the tone, but it feels so different from anything else i've read about politics. reminds me that you recommended a bunch of soviet history books a couple years back and i've been meaning to get around to almost all of them, espec "three who made a revolution" which has been on my desk waiting to get read for months. (the one i did read was sheila fitzpatrick's short-ish history, which was great.)

oh v glad! that fitzpatrick book's still my favorite primer, not great-man-focused like the rest i probably recommended, so a good one to have picked. on the great-man front (great as in groznyi) everyone's since flipped for kotkin's stalin.

I picked up another Simenon from the local library, The Widow. It is interesting enough. He has a keen eye for the telling detail and a firm grip on human psychology. The emotions he explores are generally subtle ones.

Finished Petrarch's Canzoniere - had only read excerpts and not the full cycle before, and the full thing is tough or incomprehensible (depending on your experiences in life). Incredibly single-minded, it seemed aware of its own place in history as the cycle closed with Petrarch's death and contemplation of re-unification with his Madonna

Now finishing a book of free-verse Indian poetry/devotional sayings from around 12th century dedicated to the goddess Siva.

Took a break from Barrington Bayley to read the latest from Domenic Stansberry, The White Devil, which is based on a Renaissance play of the same name based on a true story, all news to me. It was up to his usual high standard of cool, intelligent noir. I need to go back and read the two books of his I haven't read yet.

But I know, he is on that list of writers that are only read by James Redd, at least ILB-wise.

I enjoyed his book for Hard Case Crime, though that is all of his i have read. Enjoyed the original webster white devil play, too, and would love to read a noir redo of it.

The Confession was the HCC one. It won an Edgar, although there was some kind of strange controversy about that. Seems to be out of print, maybe one offer belongs on that one other thread.

i read Kwaidan. unusual ghost stories. sad that it ends on an essay that seems to advocate eugenics.

Started this last night, am half a dozen stories in: https://cdn.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9780141395722.jpg
and there's some astonishing stuff so far, especially Nescio's 'Young Titans' and Ferdinand Bordewijk's 'The Briefcase'.

Sorry, huge fucking image!

Should add that Joost Zwagerman, the editor, put this book together and then committed suicide before its publication.

K(w)Aidan the film is one of my favourites. I think 2 of the 4 parts are taken from the book and another from another story collected by Hearn but in another book and it's visually stunning.

(The method of converting Japanese to English changed sometime between the book and the film and the w is no longer there which is why the film title has the odd brackets in it)

I saw the film a while ago but I don't remember much of it. I should watch it again.

(It mentions the change to the way they Anglicise Japanese in the intro to my copy so that's where I saw that. And all 4 stories are from Hearn collections)

Everything available here - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/368

One Way Out the Allman Brothers Oral History . Pretty fascinating so far but I just got up to Berry Oakley dying so not sure if it will sustain for teh other half of the book.

I hadn't realised that Gov't Mule were directly related to the ABB until I was looking through the discography recommendations at the back of the book. Looks like it's later members' side project.

Groucho and Me by Groucho Marx.
Pretty satisfying read. Not all wisecracks like i had feared when I first started it. Just got as far as Groucho having retired from films after hanging on the ladder at the end of Night In Casablanca for longer than comfortable.
Quite insightful in places while pretty funny throughout.

Hatchet Job is Kermode

Frank?

Oh, I see.

Kermode is Mark.

Quiff sporting film reviewer type talking about process of attending film screenings, meeting annoyed film makers and having to pay to see bad films released without press screenings. Normally as early as possible on Friday morning before needing to review that afternoon.

Been enjoying but left behind in a flat I might stop worrying about when I get back to.

Did anyone end up getting this edition of the Voynich manuscript, discussed in Spring and All 2k16? I'm intrigued.

https://www.amazon.ca/Voynich-Manuscript-Raymond-Clemens/dp/0300217234

"Pack My Bag" is probably my least-liked Henry Green book (I'm just not that interested in his years at school and college, even with the tug and tension of a youngish man anticipating being sent to war imminently) but he's always such a pleasure to read.

Now I'm also reading "The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald because I'm never one to ignore a trend.

I read the lovely NYROB editions of Back and Caught last month.

Mark Kermode
Born Mark James Patrick Fairey 2 July 1963 (age 53) Barnet, London, England
Residence Brockenhurst, Hampshire, England
Occupation Film critic, presenter, writer, musician
Spouse(s) Linda Ruth Williams

I've always wondered if he took Kermode after Frank - or for the pun on 'commode'?

it's his mother's maiden name

no pretty sure it's cause it sounds like shitter

It's Kerr-mode though, innit.

I read Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives, after reading about it on here (I think). I couldn't decide if it was a bagatelle, a vanity project, or if it cut right to the heart of Freud's legacy. Probably a mixture of the three. Masson and Swales come out of it seeming agreeably mental.

On a related note, having read and enjoyed a few of Adam Phillips' books, and Irving Yalom's Love's Executioner, are there other canonical 'literature of therapy' or books I could/should look for?

I've just started Don Quixote

yo también

Started readin orientalism (which I've only read parts of before) and Anagram by Moore. Also been given books by two old guys from the pub (James Herbert and wilbur smith, naturally) which I'll be too polite to not read. I liked Herbert when I was a teenager...

Herbert and smith wrote the books, they're not the old guys .

read the title story of Ted Chiang 'The Story of Your Life' last night. Haven't seen Arrival yet, but really loved the story

Finished Magda Szabo's The Door, it didn't make me feel bad about myself.
Sorry if this makes me an inhuman monster.

is it meant to? I've been looking forward to reading it for a while, have a copy in my pile.

Just finished Magda Szabo's The Door. Really excellent, mysterious, unnerving, but man. Some books leave me feeling worse about humanity, the future, the world, this is the rare book that left me feeling worse about myself.
― JoeStork, Saturday, December 10, 2016 6:40 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also, for the record, Stoner bored me.

did you enjoy Szabo, though?

i hope i haven't painted a target on my back by sticking my neck out as a Stoner-liker :-P

I don't know about anyone else, but I hold a mean grudge about book recommendations. You're dead to me now.

It was more that the narrator's guilt over her failures and justifications for said failures had uncomfortable parallels to moments in my own life that i try not to dwell on too much.

I've been reading Homo Zapiens by Victor Pelevin and enjoying the hell out of it. Man is wow to man.

I've been slowly reading Eimear McBride's vivid, densely sensory Lesser Bohemians and feeling like I should be reading it aloud; I'm also starting Ishion Hutchinson's latest collection of poems, House of Lords and Commons, and Dorothy Parker's stories in Laments for the Living--I don't know that I'd call Parker underappreciated, but her use of dialogue is exact and unsparing in a way that goes beyond her reputation as a wit.

Started readin orientalism (which I've only read parts of before) and Anagram by Moore

After reading her three novels in the last month, this strikes me as the weakest (I read it first).

did you enjoy Szabo, though

It was fine, v good character study, some insight into Hungarian life, I wasn't particularly emotionally invested but that was my problem really.

It was more that the narrator's guilt over her failures and justifications for said failures had uncomfortable parallels to moments in my own life

If it's any consolation (I highly doubt it) I didn't blame her for what happened.

Yeah, I didnt think that her actions were wrong or indicative of a deeply flawed character or anything; it's more that I related to her method of self-examination, which admittedly is not super healthy.

Also, for the record, Stoner bored me.

I read Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives, after reading about it on here (I think). I couldn't decide if it was a bagatelle, a vanity project, or if it cut right to the heart of Freud's legacy. Probably a mixture of the three. Masson and Swales come out of it seeming agreeably mental.

There's a point where Swales seems like he is going to be the normal guy, compared to Masson anyway - and then suddenly, nope.

I'd lean towards bagatelle, but I'd read Janet Malcolm's bagatelles any day. Did you read about the court case? Seems so strange that he contested five single quotes, when he's so oblivious and obnoxious over so much of the rest of the book

I received the over-a-thousand-page second volume of the Pike/Wilkins translation of The Man Without Qualities for Christmas. I started it last night. I will decide about whether or not to read the over-600 page Posthumous Papers section of this volume after I drag myself another 400 pages, across the finish line on page 1130 of the 'official' novel.

(Aimless tilts his head back to gaze at the ceiling and lifts hands, palms upward, in an imploring gesture.)

merry xmas ILB

finished The Last Samurai and started the Rick Perlstein Goldwater book on xmas eve. verrry addictive so far

btw, if anyone has a remarkably clever title for the winter 2017 WAYR thread, ILB will soon be in the market for such a thing and will pay top dollar.

granta are doing a nice series in which writer's write about their favourite book from a given year, lots of links here: https://twitter.com/GrantaMag

which leads me to: should i read ice by anna kavan?

Desmond Morris the Naked Woman since it was on a charity shop shelf last week.
Also started Tom Jones.

xp Goodreads just recommended Ice to me, I'm def curious, though I just started Jerusalem and should probably not have too many other books going for a bit.

imo, the problem with computer-generated recommendations is that they just try to feed you more of whatever you read the most, so that if you follow their suggestions your breadth of reading material will automatically narrow further and further until you are reading nothing but clones of some book you originally enjoyed, minus any sense of discovery. I like to play the field.

i wouldn't read that far into my being intrigued by one computer generated recommendation.

Hooray another Pelevin fan! I just got Empire V for xmas. Haven't started it yet.

i reread ice earlier this year and it was a lot more enjoyable than my first go through. not really comparable to anything else i can think of. also been planning on revisiting eagle's nest, one of her earlier novels which is more in a kafka mode. would love to get hold of her short story collections, the ones i've read are a+ stuff.

Can't scroll up right not, assume you are talking about Anna Kavan, right?

the one and only. would be interested to know if anyone's read any of the pre-ak helen ferguson novels?

Speaking of Tarkovsky and such - I have quite a lot of Russian poetry, but it's all fairly old. Does anyone know anything about newish Russian poetry they'd like to recommend?

Helen DeWitt fans, have you read her second novel, Lightning Rods? I've been curious although hear it's quite different from The Last Samurai.

I did a search upon finishing tLS last week, seemed to have gotten mixed reviews (but also apparently is sort of about statistics? very high chance i will read it)

some discussion beginning here

a kind of simulation but better than the real thing ever was - the Tom McCarthy thread

I would completely recommend Lightning Rods - it's very different but also brilliant - the two together make me think she's just the best. There's a kind of what-was-that-? quality to it… a taste I don't really get anywhere else (my other comments are in that linked thread although they do lead down into incomprehensibility)

and xp on Russian poetry - I enjoyed the selection of new Russian political poets in the previous issue of N+1 (no. 26) - I don't think you can get to it if you're not a subscriber, but ilx mail me and I'll share or, if you want to go hunting, the names are Kirill Medvedev, Galina Rymbu, Elena Kostyleva, Roman Osminkin, Keti Chukhrov.

L.rods is very funny and weird

Any algorithm recommending anna kavan and not harper lee is already ahead of the game imo

Cool, thanks for the link and thoughts on l rods. The posts in the McCarthy thread have definitely further piqued my interest!

lightning rods is very good in a very different way from last samurai. i saw her speak earlier this year and she is, i think, super brilliant.

yeah i thought lightning rods was hilarious, half from the writing itself and half from my ongoing disbelief that someone actually wrote this book. also very angry. she's def brilliant, i'd be kinda terrified to speak to her.

It is happening again: A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17