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

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.)

Finished "The Great Railway Bazaar" by Paul Theroux. I guess a train travelogue through Asia written in the '70s is kind of a minefield for potentially un-PC observations and characterizations, what with the need to quickly limn a character or bottle the atmosphere of an exotic locale in a knowing way, but Theroux comes out of it mostly unscathed, although some of his characterizations do seem a bit cliched at times. Quite readable as a picture of a unique time and place (or I should say, of many unique places at a particular time). That moment (1975) was probably just about the last point in time that a trip like that could still feel like a real adventure. Passing through the tail end of the Vietnam war helps a bit.

Now reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

I have been reading Didion's Blue Nights. I'm not sure what to make of it, yet. It consists of Didion bouncing around in her memories and often regretful emotions concerning her adopted daughter who died in young adulthood. Its primary value is exposing the thought processes of someone in grief who is struggling to find meaning in a welter of memories, so as to regain some sort of mental balance in their presence.

It is a very exposing exercise and it is difficult not to engage in a certain amount of criticism of the author, not as an author, but as a person. Didion herself invites this reaction, in part because she also engages in frequent bouts of self-doubting and self-criticism. One wants to shake her from time to time and talk some sense into her. Of course, that would do no good and that is not 'the point'.

All one can do is participate silently as a witness to this parade of memories, griefs, doubts, apologies, self-excusing, and assorted revelations, which ceremony of confessing and witnessing ultimately is the only real point of the book. It makes it very hard to be the reader, though, even if it was cathartic for the author.

About 90 pages into On The Road, and more than pleasantly surprised so far by Kerouac's version of polish. It's cast as a memoir, with the shining train moving out of the shadows---the author/narrator's early real-life troubles, minimally alluded to here, a proto-Beat scene already seeming stagnant, Neil/Dean's mentioned childhood with his wino father, whom he begged for in the streets and courtrooms--and passing through more: in Chicago, he notes the the "tired" bop of the late 40s, between Bird's creative peaks and Miles' recasting, the "old" and "sad" people and places (more the latter) along the way---and he's already mentioning that he and Dean fell out later, that the rejuvenation of young jades in Denver didn't last. But he remembers the excitement of discovery too, and the details are vivid and lucid, like Jack London's railroad and backstreet chronicles (although JK's more excitable, duh).

Also the vitality and resourcefulness of other people on the road, such as the guy in "a toolbox on wheels... driving it standing up, like a milkman."

"shining train," yeesh--thinking of "train of thought"---so far he's mostly hitchhiking, occasionally hopping a bus.

what if your gut reaction is these people are immature and they are getting away with it? does that make you old (even if you are only 17 or 18 -- from what I can remember -- maybe I've got it all wrong and I'm misremembering or it would be different now)? why can some people get away with it? are they just optimists? are they just open?!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Nobody Knows My Name by (according to the book's cover blurb) "America's angry young man", James Baldwin. Some of the topical details are outdated, but it is still full of observations and analysis relevant to what was called "the race question" back in the day.

When I finish this, I have checked out a copy of Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin, to see if it suits my mood. If it doesn't, I've got plenty more where that came from.

Almost at the end of Cloud Atlas, which has been pretty good. Been reading it mainly on buses or might have had it finished sooner.

Started Wolf Hall as my bedtime book though it might just wind up being my travel book once i get through the next 20 pages of Cloud Atlas.
Anyway am enjoying it greatly. Have read first few chapters.

Still reading Edward Conlon's Blue blood which is pretty great too. Cop memoir about end of the last millennium/beginning of this one.

Also just grabbed Senor Nice in a charity shop buy.
& a set of Aleister Crowley short stories including The Drug though I'm not overly impressed so far. But they had it for €5 in the local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop and I thought I'd give it a chance since I might not see it again. I'd had it pointed out by a friend who bought a set of his Simon Iff stories. The idea of a psychic detective sounds interesting so I might grab a copy of that iff it turns up again.

On chapter twelve of the most recent winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award,Station Eleven, which seems to be the story of a post-pandemic traveling theater troupe. So far so good.

Been wondering about that one. Might have to get it.