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

I'm going out of town and about to start Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, anyone read it?

yes, heartily recommend. contains both epic sweep and grain of everyday life. patois a little tough at first, but I soon got w/rhythms, so to speak.

"Look Homeward Angel - mmm..."

reading thomas wolfe in 2015 is a bold move! i think if you look up the word unfashionable in the dictionary...

Forget it, skot, it's ILBtown

Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe (60s pieces) my high school freshman salvation

JAMES MORRISON! thought you might enjoy this:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/10/anatomy-of-a-cover-the-complete-works-of-flannery-oconnor/

Finished a few shorts works. With My Dog's Eyes by Hilda Hilst is what people think Clarice Lispector think she is doing, i.e. someone who truly seems to have absorbed Irish modernism of Joyce and Beckett by its motifs, state of mind, prose-via-poetry (this is more directly applied to Joyce). My read couldn't be as attentive (life etc.) however I can say I liked how it would switch from prose, to a poem, and how that would trade back-and-forth. It pursues the occult (perhaps in a Crowley sense) (whereas Lispector is quite spiritual). There are a couple more works in translation that I want to chase. The onto Perlefter by Joseph Roth. Something else, an unfinished 100 pages on the main character's life, family, business, as told his nephew/distant family member. The unfinished tone doesn't mean too much, they feel like at times beautifully drawn sketches of people and places, the imagination would run into overdrive to invent the most random things to colour in a character, before discarding the same and moving on - its so fast.., and Roth is vampiric in his devouring of characters and scenes.

Celine's Normance was great: revels in hallucination and delirium. As all round him went off to experiment in the Roman Celine was the one who really kept the Rabelaisian fire alive in French writing.

I got waylaid by something called The Infinite Book by some guy named John Barrow, which chats about the mathematics of infinity, but popularized into terms simple enough for the general public to understand. You could put it in the bathroom and read it as you shit, if that appeals to you. And yet, here I am reading the thing anyway.

what is the difference between what people think clarice lispector thinks she's doing and what clarice lispector thinks she's doing

and what clarice lispector is doing

aargh sorry that was garbled.

The odd review I've seen of Lispector = this is the Brazilian Joyce and Beckett.

What I've read of Clarice != Joyce or anything like that.

idk what Lispector's own view of her work was.

Fran Lebowitz Reader
You Can't Win - Black

damn i was really hoping for something there

Scott, thanks for that link. Some of those O'Connor covers are beautiful.

i'm finally into dahlgren by samuel delaney and it's partially responsible for cheering me up after a few dour months. i thought i didn't like it at first but i've warmed up to its enthusiastic weirdness. i'm still left cold by some of the more opaque tricky writerly who-is-even-speaking-here bits but that's down to my own impatience and density i think.

sorry, dhalgren by samuel delany!

I enjoyed most of it well enough as a sequence of set pieces, incl. sex, although not the keep-an-open-mind-about-rapiness and yeah opaque leisureliness, like wasn't surprised later when reading that he tweaked it off and on for years, between many other projects. Recall that Philip K. Dick and other out-there colleagues panned it. Will re-read it someday maybe, but that's where I got off the bus, so lots of catching up with SD to do.

This book has its own ILB Reading Club thread, and you might find some good feedback there.

oh right, i forgot about that thread, weirdly, because now i remember being enthused in it

Happily, The Infinite Book came to an end. The author's enthusiasm for digressions into theology and science fictional scenarios did not aid my enjoyment.

Now I am reading a Laurens Van Der Post book, The Heart of the Hunter, one of his many books about the Bushmen and the Kalahari desert - in this case it's a non-fiction personal account. He is a romantic at heart and it shows in his many verbal flights, but he is also a craftsman, so his flights succeed in conveying you precisely where he wants you to go, more often than not, even when describing so hackneyed a subject as a sunset. That feat requires exceptional talent.

I want to read that, also Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. Anybody here familiar with his writing?
Just finished Invisible Man. It immediately lights up its own place on my map, which still has a lot of gaps, as one of those antic epics, fearlessly idealistic and absurdist, soul-searching and crowd-pleasing, somewhere in the vicinity of other post-WWII pre-Beat bangers like From Here To Eternity and The Adventures of Augie March, also the pre-War experiments with imagery x observation, like USA and Day of the Locust. The folk and blues elements keep showing up, often unsolicited and then some, with old and new effects on the narrator's headspin. The range of "Alabama" and A Love Supreme seem prefigured here, among other jazz; also the disturbances of John Wesley Harding and The Complete Basement Tapes---we even get to "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION," with appropriately inappropriate responses along the way.

I just finished Invisible Man last night!

I really envy anyone reading that for the first time. It strikes me as a much more unsettling picaresque than Augie March, but you're right, Dylan and Ellison have a similar sense of the strange lower frequencies of the vernacular.

Oh for sure this is more unsettling, which is why I started hearing "Alabama" in my head while reading. Coltrane and Ellison make their own uses of the blues, and vice versa.

A book that in my mind seems to follow in the surreal, madcap picaresque vein of Invisible Man is Thomas Pynchon's V. For instance, the opening fight scene in the bar in V reminds me a lot of the riot scene in the bordello in Invisible Man.

Bruce Chatwin is pretty good. I have an omnibus of most of his novels. I haven't read Songlines in about 20 years though but do remember things like the old aborigine sitting on the back seat of a car travelling along the route of one of these lines and making a guttural sound that whoever else is in the car can't understand. it's then revealed that he is singing the songline at the speed the car is moving. Songlines being central to the aborigine creation myth, in which who ever the first creature is travelled across the land singing up the country, describing what was where. & the aborigines recreated this as they moved around on walkabouts or whatever, singing the song of what goes where. It could all be bunk for what I know and I would need to read some aboriginal anthropology, preferably by an aborigine author to confirm the veracity of it. It is pretty well written though.

I think I have a good biography of Chatwin too, though it could have been a library borrowing. CAn't think of the author but it could be the Nicholas Shakespeare one. I'm half remembering something about Chatwin having been an auctioneer for somebody like Sotheby's but giving it up early on to travel.
I think I still need to read a few of the contents of that omnibus including In Patagonia, but i have a to-read list of a couple of hundred things. & have something like that as physical books around the flat amongst all the ones i have actually read. I can't resist charity shop bookshelves.

That songlines theology summary is pretty accurate to real life

Wasnt van der post found to have faked a lot of stuff?

Can anyone recommend a good, accessible history dealing with citrus cultivation?

Bruce Chatwin -I'm a big fan (with significant reservations) and a completist, which isn't that difficult considering his slender oeuvre. An 80s figure who's barely remembered now. Songlines and In Patagonia are probably his best books, sold as travel writing but slippery and hard to categorize. On The Black Hill is a short psychological novel about twin brothers that also evokes the English countryside in lush prose. Utz is a novella about a mad collector that's undoubtedly inspired by Chatwin's experience as a curator at Sotheby's in the 1960s. The Viceroy of Ouidah, a novel set in Africa, I read but can't remember much about. Welcome to middle age! What Am I Doing Here is a collection of short pieces, hit or miss. His letters are worth a look if you like the published work, as is his editor Susannah Clapp's reminiscence With Chatwin: Portrait of A Writer The Nicholas Shakespeare biography is good. And finally here's a thing about the letters that I put on Huffpost a few years back and the world ignored. boohoo.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-coleman/the-cosmopolitan-nomad_b_845277.html"> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-coleman/the-cosmopolitan-nomad_b_845277.html

the east coast of the united states is littered with bruce chatwin books. in case that was geographical information anyone needed. there are multiple copies in every used book store in massachusetts alone. so, he definitely struck a chord here. i really liked the books i read by him, but that was years ago. poetic. entertaining. he had a poet's eye for people and things. i think i just read the non-novels though.

The entry for Van Der Post in Wikipedia simply reveals that he apparently impregnated a 14 year old girl in 1952, then states:

"His reputation as a "modern sage" and "guru" was questioned, journalists opened a floodgate of examples of how van der Post had sometimes embellished the truth in his memoirs and travel books."

If the word "embellished" was correctly chosen and accurately reflects the controversy, then it is not a grievous charge against him. Anyone who reads his books as anthropology is sadly misguided. It is obvious to me that his account is highly colored and rhetorically structured to elicit the desired emotional impact. He's a novelist and instinctive romantic who would not scruple to slant his material, if it served his artistic goal.

Finished "Albion's Seed" (probably enough of a recommendation to mention in passing that it was 900 pages long, definitely changed my way of thinking about early American history) and am now reading "The Great Railway Bazaar" by Paul Theroux.

reading knausgaard <3

I finished Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES (1972).

for a while I worried that this book felt too much like a pastiche (of Kafka and Borges, mainly; perhaps by extension of the Arabian Nights and the like). To put it harshly, I worried that it could be kitsch -- as in Orientalist / fabulist / whimsical kitsch. I don't know if it felt at all this way when it came out. More likely, I think it has been a victim of its own success: Rushdie, Carter, Winterson, et al (even David Mitchell perhaps - and I can easily imagine a Will Self, Sarah Waters, Robert MacFarlane or anyone else today trying their hand at it) have written so much that feels in this vein, the vein no longer feels very creditable.

Against that, simply, the imagination of the cities. I really like their diversity, their different names (do the names have any relation to the content? I could never see that they did), the way that they work as parables of ideas, and to an extent even parables of real urban tendencies (eg suburban sprawl in Penthesilea). The longer the book went on, the more I felt reassured that these imaginative ideas were what it was about, and the mannerisms can be bracketed off. In fact the longer it goes on, the more profound I think the ideas of the imagined cities become. By the end I felt Calvino was really saying a few things.

Finished Steve Connor's book BECKETT, MODERNISM AND THE MATERIAL IMAGINATION (2014).

Brilliant, by default, as he always is.

Otherwise: the theory stuff doesn't usually do so much for me at this point. A chapter on Sartre I could hardly bring myself to get through. Much sparring with Badiou which feels rather superfluous to me - I mean, in 10 or 20 years' time I doubt that Badiou will seem crucial to understanding Beckett.

Work on media (radio, tape) and their effects on art and thought - I respect this aspect of Steve's work. He has more good ideas about it than most.

The last section on Worlds seemed to me to pick things up. Fine and enjoyable things in the essay on universities, though he gets into a polemic about academics today which I am not sure is well judged. As an academic I could not accept his characterization of me (not that it matters). It would take a while to explain this in detail.

I can share his idea that Beckett is about finitude, in that everything is. I think he could have said it more plainly without bothering with J-L Nancy's theory talk. But I was a bit bamboozled by the last para where he seemed to lose track of finitude and risk turning it into infinitude again.

I am not sure that the governing idea of 'the material imagination' is fully worked out here (maybe elsewhere). And the book is only partially about 'modernism'. Nonetheless I find it doubtful that many people will have published better books about Beckett this decade, because none of them are Steve Connor.

FITE

Finally started My Struggle – a whole lot of OK at this point.

Also: the new James Merrill biography. The ONLY James Merill bio.

http://conversationalreading.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/bernhard-correction.jpg

saw this in bookstore recently & thought what the heck, it's been too long since I read Bernhard... so far (first ~100pp) I think I'd rank it even above The Loser, my previous favorite of his novels (though I've only read about half of 'em, & not always to completion)

I am currently failing at finishing Independent People By Halldor Laxness - liking some bits a heck of a lot, other bits feel like too much of a struggle. I do want to know what happens to Bjartur and daughter but I am not sure I care for what is around them.

The last half of Van Der Post's book turned into a lengthy padding-out, where he ran out of memoir material too soon to make a full length book. He recounts a basketful of Bushman myths that he mostly cribs from other sources and then breathlessly interprets them to the reader.

Not surprisingly, every myth is a masterpiece and every symbol the best possible choice, revealing the Bushmen culture as pure, innocent genius. That is, if you accept Van Der Post's modest claim to have a unique insight no other westerner could provide. Obviously, he'd discovered through his first book, BBC film, and lecture tour that the Bushman was a valuable property and he was determined to become their impresario and ride them for all they were worth. By the end, his naked self-promotion became tedious. Too bad. Romanticism and ego so often seem to be joined at the hip.

Now I'm reading Her Majesty's Spymaster, by Stephen Budiansky, about Sir Francis Walsingham. So far it is brisk, competent and interesting.

Invisible Cities sounds great.

Glad to hear that dutch_justice!

Yesterday I read Richard Ellmann's FOUR DUBLINERS (1985) - in full, as it's only 100pp or so. It seems like vieux chapeau but I learned things! For instance that Oscar Wilde met the Pope in 1877.

What did he say to him?
Have you read Beckett's monograph on Proust? I read the New Directions (?) pb many years ago and found it really appealing, wothout having read much Proust; especially liked discussion of how we experience memory, trying to delve deeper/make up better stories (getting past the nth replay of Tape B-4, how Auntie did me wrong that Christmas and the next etc etc)

The Pope encouraged Wilde to join the Catholic Church. Funny, that. I mean - is the Pope Catholic?

"Wilde found the meeting awesome; he said not a word, closeted himself in his hotel room, and emerged with a sonnet".

But later that day he prostrated himself before Keats's grave: "It was a humbler obeisance than he had given to the Pope".

... And he did not convert (until c.1900).

Enrique Vila-Matas - Bartleby & Co. Sheesh, this is too much like my life, didn't like what I was reading ;-) But really I don't want to google the people I didn't know just in case they are all made up. Otherwise idk enough about Melville but in Vila-Matas' own terms I am not sure he should be as central to 'No' writing as he thinks, as in Melville stopped writing novels after Confidence Man but not writing altogether and he was writing Billy Budd in any case? Not negating as much as perhaps others. Gives way too much space to Kafka who was writing and correcting proofs to stories till the end.

Reading it as a parody of literature fandom/LOL amateur lit crit etc. Still kept thinking its not as inventive as Bolano's Nazi Literatures...

Didn't think of it as a parody and as far as I know pretty much everyone mentioned in it is real.

Note I don't think whether they actually wrote at all or not is quite the criterion, the nature of what they wrote counts as well.

Just saw an intriguing book with a forward by him, The Art of Flight, by Sergio Pitol.

I am currently failing at finishing Independent People By Halldor Laxness - liking some bits a heck of a lot, other bits feel like too much of a struggle. I do want to know what happens to Bjartur and daughter but I am not sure I care for what is around them.

i guess it drags a little in places but i thought this book was fascinating - great wit and insight woven into such a bloody-minded world.

Langdon Hall - James Merrill: His Life and Art
Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle Book 1

i don't know if i could do the karl ove books. he's certainly interesting and i enjoyed that NYT thing a lot.

LG - 'bloody-minded' is a good description. It is totally my thing. I'll re-retry next year.

Note I don't think whether they actually wrote at all or not is quite the criterion, the nature of what they wrote counts as well.

Just saw an intriguing book with a forward by him, The Art of Flight, by Sergio Pitol.

― The Stan-Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, April 25, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

re: Vila-Matas. Know what you mean but a lot of weight is put into whether they gave up writing at some point. Kafka's diary entry despairing he can't write that wk because he is in awe of Goethe. Or there are shadowy figures like Goethe's companion (?) (mentioned in Magris' Danube) who writes a dozen poems which is published as Goethe and she doesn't take credit.

re: Pitol. Posted a .jpg in the Spanish books thread. That comes from a small press that I am not sure gets good distribution over here but I am hopeful I can score a copy.

bjartur is one of the great literature's greatest bollockses

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

i've read this. it's awesome

Solstice getting near. About time for ILB to break out its ice cream suit and start a new summer reading thread.

for a little while when i was a kid i would reread the susan cooper books at every solstice

Do your final dance around the maypole because Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?