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

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

one of literature's greatest bollockses*

(thought i'd sent this at the weekend, clearly not)

Tim Powers - Last Call. An enjoyable piece of Nevada hokum - the power struggles of Las Vegas as battle for souls with the tarot. There's too many characters and it goes on for too long, but it has some real strengths. There are one or two genuinely unnerving images and scenes. The main character's older brother just perching on the roof all day long staring to the east after the father has assumed his soul, his wife's ghost lurking in the wardrobe, before later capering around in the desert like a monkey in the form of Death. I don't think I'm going to forget those.

The mental deterioration and slipping between different consciousnesses and realities is done far better than I've come across before. There's a good general sense of paranoia and dislocated fear.

The desert/Lake Mead/casino landscape is clearly relished as well - luridness amidst the barrenness. All in all it was a bit like a sloppy burger of Burroughs and Pynchon, and it was perfect reading while I was there.

Also Frederic Prokosch's The Seven Who Fled, but i'll go over to the thread for that.

Oh and a quick re-read of bits of Ballard's The Kindness of Women, which, outside of the short stories, feels in lots of ways one of my favourite JGB's. Not really a sequel to Empire of the Sun, which is what it seems to get touted as.

david commins - the wahhabi mission and saudi arabia
clive coates - the wines of burgundy
martin wiener - english culture and the decline of the industrial spirit
perry anderson - english questions
tom mccarthy - satin island
janet halley - split decisions
george jackson - soledad brother
richard evans - cosmopolitan islanders

The texts with which I've been most impressed lately are Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (novum after novum after novum, one of the most conceptually and affectively rich SF novels I've read: I loved the way the disorientation of Delany's world-building never let up but strangely never detracted from the poignancy of the encounter between Marq and Rat Korga, and Delany would still deserve a privileged place in SF history if he had only ever written Stars's prologue and the scene of the dragon hunt), Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart (barely plotted, but Lispector's intensity holds it together: it's amazing to me how quickly her style coalesced), David Markson's collage of anecdotes around art and contingency, This is Not a Novel, and Leslie Silko's Ceremony (the protagonist's war trauma and alienation from a brutally racist society seem more convincingly imagined than his recovery of Laguna Pueblo culture, but the patchwork of realism and myth is effective). I'm also starting Kate Zambreno's Green Girl and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed.

Cool, be sure to read LeG.'s The Left Hand of Darkness too.

Yeah, I want to come around to that and Delany's "To Read The Dispossessed." (I've read his other response to Le Guin, Trouble on Triton, so that text is framing my reading of The Dispossessed in certain ways.) I tend to follow out enthusiasms for individual writers (lately Delany among SF authors) in an unsystematic way, so I still have great swathes of the SF canon to look forward to.

HL Mencken's 'Happy Days' and 'Newspaper Days'

Turn the Beat Around an alternative history of Disco have had this lying around the bed for the last age with me meaning to start reading it so finally have. Got it in a charity shop a couple of years ago.
Pretty interesting so far. Just been talking about elongating grooves and early extended mixes of records.

Picked up bringing Out The Bodies teh 2nd part of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell biographical novels. Surprised to find that cheap in a charity shop since i thought the recent series would mean it would get snapped up rapidly. maybe I was the first person to see it.
Anyway looking forward to reading it, but wondering if I should have tried to read the first part first. Would I be missing anything by not doing so now that I have watched the tv series? I assume I know the basic story even if I miss some of the internal dialogue and therefore insight into reaction.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas currently coming to the ends of sections, just finished Timothy Cavendish on the bus last night. I think it has been a well done book but not 100% sure what to compare it to to see.

Blue Blood Edward Conlon's NYC cop memoir which is pretty interesting., Came out in 2012 so covers his career for 20 years also looks into some history including late 50s and Serpico. Currently talking about corruption in I think the 60s.

got as far as finishing the intro to strindberg's novel by the open sea (read it years ago... all i can remember of it now was the main character's breakdown leading to him hallucinating homunculi), but have been waylaid by a sherlock holmes collection with the original strand illustrations.

I've been reading Shadow of the Silk Road, Colin Thubron, a 2006 travel book wherein the author travels (where else?) the general route of the silk road through central asia. It is good enough that I shall continue on with it, but Mr. Thubron's authorial voice is not especially distinctive and like most travel books, his narrative is just a string of fragments linked together by the author's voice. This shortcoming is somewhat compensated by the exoticism of the locale and pungency of its history, which he uses to good effect.

im reading jorge luis borges' "labyrinths" for the first time. im a bit underwhelmed tbh, then again im not someone with a overly philosophical/theological mind. sorry borges.

There are few, if any, books so amazingly great that everyone enjoys them. No, not even Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Might be the wrong translation, although I haven't yet come across one that seemed too bad.

"A Vulgar Neighborhood" by John Plummer, originally published in October of 1862. Come take a tour of Whitechapel, while quivering with contemptuous titillation:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2012/05/penny-dreadfuls-in-whitechapel.html

i'm getting my first taste of joy williams in taking care and it's a doozy.

"She was an exact child, afraid of a great many things."

im reading jorge luis borges' "labyrinths" for the first time. im a bit underwhelmed tbh, then again im not someone with a overly philosophical/theological mind. sorry borges.

― tayto fan (Michael B), Wednesday, April 29, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Borges is more like a game? Frankly I think games are shit so don't mind me.

reading karate chop, a collection of short stories by a danish writer, dorthe nors, at the moment. really good stuff, a little like carver in that blunt and bleak way - very good stuff.

i get why someone would be underwhelmed by borges as a lot of the most famous stuff is closer to thought problem than story. (forking paths has characters but they are joke pulp characters; the narrator in library def has pathos but it is the pathos of his entire civilization and by extension ours so he is not exactly personally vivid. tlon uqbar and pierre menard are ideas.) labyrinths deep cuts i would recommend whose pleasures are less dry: the secret miracle, the house of asterion, the circular ruins maybe?, the thing near the end about the leopard.

i am reading 2666 and robert jordan although a few days ago i could have sworn i was reading the left hand of darkness; i think it fell under the bed.

also i got to port royal/fort beauregard a few weeks ago in a couple days of heavy shelby foote, but i was on planes.

civilization was the wrong word up there, his condition is more fundamental than that.

Some of those stories are like literary essays, which is surely no one's expectations. Possibly reading and thinking about him as a librarian in parallel might help.

Thinking about this now, and it could be what bugged me about Vila-Matas.

Anyway I am reading 120 Days of Sodom. I'll take it to the De Sade thread but so far I'd say boredom is useful.

Another spring, another Trollope novel (Phineas Redux).

Adam Mars-Jones, BLIND BITTER HAPPINESS.

Tremendous writer of criticism.

C by Tom McCarthy. Promises to be good. Present tense and contracted verbs to counter Victorianism but conservative nonetheless as I believe English culture to be even when transported to the other side of the globe, as close as I could get on the train from Brisbane to Surfers Paradise years ago (and the cream scones!). But the highrises felt like Hawaii, although I've never been there. (Does no one like Nick Clegg?)

Was not impressed with Satin Island. Had to return before starting The Blazing World because it was recalled. Same goes for Family Life by Akhil Sharma but managed to finish -- reading lazily (not attentively). The Ten Thousand Things still on coffee table. Multiple copies; should be safe. (Also promises to be good.)