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

really enjoyed your thoughts on Robinson, ledge

Thanks! Let me know what you think when you get round to it.

Eve Babitz - Eve's Hollywood: a NYRB reissue. Pretty artless but very entertaining

I saw that and its rave reviews, but I didn't like the little bit I read.

But now your description sort of makes me want to read it.

Oh man, the NYRB holiday sale catalog had a bunch of blurbs casting her as the Anti-Didion, or the younger, fun Didion: she still tattled on the tails of Tinsel Town, but she was young and fun you bet. However, I also read a bunch of excerpts meant to sell this same point (in Paris Review, I think), and I never say this but omg LOL what a self-satisfied self-indulgent klutzy sisassypants she seems to be. So cute how she never bothered to look up correct spellings of common words contained in her semi-zingers, all her friends seemly agree. Was she some kind of ironic fave, like William Hung etc.?

But you know NYRB and Paris Review, so maybe I should give her more of a chance.

er "sassypants," "seemingly" (blush, but bet she typed too fast too!)

All of that is kind of true, and yet and yet and yet... Partly it is just that her anecdotes are actually very interesting, no matter how they're told

I was really put off by the lackluster style as well but if Mr. Morrison recommends...

I have a hunch that the translator David Magarshak bears much responsibility for this, but I am not finding the Chekhov short stories very impressive. I expect I'll soldier on, but I wouldn't recommend this version.

Haven't read those, but enjoyed his versions of The Idiot and Bros K. Will give Babitz a decent chance if ever come across one of her books.

OK, I must admit the Babitz became significantly less charming as it went along and she got older and more up herself.

Now reading Hermione Eyre: Viper Wine -- sort-of historical novel about real-life 17th Century society beauty obsessed with staying young and her doting explorer husband, recast in this book as something of an alchemist and sort-of time-traveller, leading to all sorts of cheerful and funny anachronisms. Really good so far

Simenon - Tropic Moon. probably the only Simenon I'll ever need. As noted its a tad similar to the African passages in Celine's Journey... but its handling of a kind of mood -- that of corruption and degradation is so intense. It would be a lot more known about if Maigret hadn't overwhelmed the shelves, took NYRB to curate it and in that sense its one of the finer things they've bought out.

Vasily Grossman - Armenian Sketch. Read this in a sitting - always in this conversational mode, but its so much more than that. Doubt travelogues are as good as this - its so digressive. And it doesn't exactly gets you to go to Armenia (although sign me up) because you almost certainly wouldn't get what Grossman is able to get out of it (or Mandelstam, probably goes double for him). The descriptions of people, food, architecture, culminating with the humanist speeches at the wedding (and Soviet politics are also never far away) - its a performance of a writer fully able to transmit what he sees, hears and feels to his pen.

Christopher Isherwood - Mr Norris Changes Trains
Jacob Weisberg - Ronald Reagan
Louise Bogan - The Blue Estuaries: Poems

I finished The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann. I've been meaning to read more fiction this year, so I went through the NY Times notable books lists from a couple of years ago to find some things that sounded interesting and are in paperback. This is one of those. It was kind of an odd combination of a dysfunctional family drama and a murder story (not a mystery, it uses the horrific elements for suspense and tragic effect and as a springboard to other themes, somewhat in the vein of The Shack or The Lovely Bones). It's definitely not a feel-good story. The characters are kind of selfish and self-absorbed and pretty much completely fail to rise to the occasion, but they remain somewhat sympathetic nonetheless. Not sure why the author thought this particular combination of themes was compelling, but I guess, yeah, sometimes awful things happen and they just make things worse for people who already have problems of their own.

Now I'm reading Guantanamo Diary. It seems like this will be 300 pages of me thinking "Wow, that's really fucked up."

Ullman is directors Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman's daughter, so some pedigree for grim dysfuntional family dramas there, i guess

Vasily Grossman - The Road. Short stories and articles. So far the stories are sorta ok and develop the theme of the novels (short stories are boring me more and more these days tbh) but this only really gets going in the account of the Nazi concentration camp in "The Hell of Treblinka". Grossman's writing is full of moral force, and a coolness in the face of inhumanity, but also managing to be conversational and tender. I can't see any of the various journo-historians w/an agenda (LOL Anne Applebaum) and number-of-dead counters getting anywhere near this.

Marianne Fritz: The Weight of Things -- odd, intense, elliptical little Austrian novel about women betraying one another, motherhood, madness, step-parents, all that fun stuff

Fritz seems fascinating, especially for her later novels, which sound radically resistant to translation: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/10/01/the-nonessential-on-marianne-fritz/

Thomas Bernhard was not a fan... http://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/adrian-west-on-marianne-fritz/

A contrasting view was held by Thomas Bernhard, who addressed his esteemed publisher, Siegfried Unseld, with characteristic charm in 1986:

Before my departure I have had another glance at your recent publishing catastrophe: the 3,000 pages you have had printed and allowed to appear are the greatest embarrassment I have been acquainted with to this day. To print and bind over 3,000 pages of mindless proletarian trash with all the bombast of a centenary event belongs, quite frankly, in the record books: as a world record of stupidity. I am not speaking so much of the begetter of this idiocy, rather of the fact that the publisher has handicapped himself by releasing this fatuous vulgarity.

iow, Thomas Bernhard was not her intended audience

I for one would consider it an honor to be on the wrong side of Thomas Bernhard. I mean, he's a noted curmudgeon, no?

indeed! oddly enough, though, the earlier parts of the Marianne Fritz book made me think of them--similar bitterness about post-war Austria, its complacency, etc

and, tbf, the book he was criticising apparently had pages looking like this
http://www.asymptotejournal.com/admin/data/NMIII.jpg

I'd have to say I also am not her intended audience.

You don't have to say it, we guessed already

Oh, and I'm reading and enjoying Bill Schelly's Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America - such a sad story, in many ways.

I'd have to say I also am not her intended audience.

I'd hasten to add that the book I read was NOT like that page at all

Yes I think that was her debut work.

I will be starting on Josef Winkler "When the time comes" shortly - also translated by Adrian West and he said somewhere her main work will never be translated but I don't see why you couldn't get at least a volume's worth across to English to get the flavour of the work - looks like a cross of Stein and Cardew's Treatise.

love this from that paris review thing:

"In general, the detractors of long, complex, unorthodox, or vexatious books have their counterpart in a small but fervent cult of readers: Joyceans, Nabokovians, those who claim to think highly of William Burroughs. In many cases, the esteem that accrues to difficult authors has little to do with their being read; a genius is born not of resolute bookworms slogging through arcane texts but of that critical mass of reviews, essays, and dissertations required to generate the clichés the reading public needs in order to sound intelligent—to make the comparison, no less inept for its ubiquity, of Knausgaard to Proust, or to apply the adjective Kafkaesque to any story about bureaucracy."

Wow.

He is an idiot, even if I'll always like him for bringing Josef Winkler into English.

Ugly THings #40 which is as good as the previous ones I've read and is almost book size. THis smoring I read the interview with Stu Boy king the original drummer with the Dictators tracing the history of the band at least up until they kicked him out.

Also read the thing on the Wrecking Crew which makes me want to see the new documentary thing.

Also reading Facing the Wrong Way the 4Ad biography still. Very interesting. Got as far as Dead can Dance''s Spleen and Ideal

Wrecking Crew doc interesting but mildly disappointing as these things can be.

wrecking crew doc gave me some chills just because the people involved are so friggin' cool and it's kinda unbelievable that they were a part of so many amazing things, but, yeah, it's not that illuminating. more like one of those labor of love things done by someone who isn't that probing. cool just to hear those people talk though. and see them.

Yup

Hadnt even realised there was a 4AD book, sounds very promising

Suhrkamp, whose director, the legendary Siegfried Unseld, hoped to market Fritz as a “female Joyce.”

A female Arno Schmidt wasn't good enough?

4AD book was in Fopp as a 2 for £5 choice. I mainly grabbed it to get the Julian Cope novel 131.
Very interesting so far. I didn't know much of the history. Just familiar with bits of the music.

Lately I've been reading Alex Mar's Witches in America, which is breezy but facile: Mar tries to put her own personality, suspended between the longing for connection with greater forces and a reflexive skepticism, at the center of her reportage on various traditions of American paganism, but she mostly winds up seeming smug. The book is interesting enough on the merits of its subject matter, but even as Mar interviews self-identified necromancers and hangs out in swamps to undergo Crowleyan initiations, the prose never really becomes lively enough to dispel the impression that this is the kind of book about researching witchcraft a Slate contributor would write.

I've also finally gotten around to Balzac's Pere Goriot; in some ways I think I like Balzac less for his own sake than for that of the writers for whom he opens a path, but I appreciate his attention to the phantasmagoric grime of city
Iife and the way he undercuts the possible sentimentality of the plot by hinting at the perverse qualities of Goriot's consuming paternal love.

I've also been reading Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights and Seduction and Betrayal: the former is one of the most successful attempts to construct a novel by the juxtaposition of lyrical fragments that I've read lately. (I'm also just a sucker, for boring personal reasons, for writers who recollect youth in Kentucky with a cold eye from a northern remove.)

Finally, I've posted about her in the ILE obituary thread, but in the days since the writer and activist Bryn Kelly's intensely saddening death, I've been reading and rereading her essays and blogs: her story "Other Balms, Other Gileads" is still one of the most moving things I've read about the everyday experience of HIV stigma today, although it doesn't quite prepare one for the scathing humor of her pseudonymous writing on medical bureaucracy and queer relationships as the Hussy and the Party Bottom. Links to most of her writing can be found here: http://topsidepress.tumblr.com/post/137350042394/i-love-your-profound-insecurity-i-love-you-even

*Witches of America, that is

Finished Pickwick Papers. Not great. His most successful novel I'm told, certainly the best selling whilst he was alive. But I found it bitty.

Started War And Peace. Not sure the chapter a day scheme suits me so I'm going for a book a month. There are 15 I think. First one is a manageable 150 pages.

Kevin Barry - Beatlebone --- very funny, lovely writing, even makes a shit like John Lennon seem likeable

after four years finally finished against the day... guess i'd have to read the whole thing straight through again to make some kind of sense of all the interweaving narrative strands that i'd completely forgotten about. one day, maybe.

Hate it when that happens.

that's one of the reasons i keep restarting 'mason & dixon' instead of just finishing it

now trying to decide whether i should read the last two thirds of finnegans wake or alternatively try to find where i got up to in tristram shandy

I went back and finished up the second half of Pierre Hadot's The Veil of Isis, which I put aside last year. That is a cool book, about the idea in Western culture of nature as veiled and elusive (and, apparently, many-breasted)

http://a405.idata.over-blog.com/364x600/4/18/31/72/Images-2/Lucrece-Frontispice.JPG

I also have a bit left in Jay Garfield's Engaging Buddhism, which I probably should not have stuck with since it isn't quite what I was looking for, and I'm nearly finished Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which is amazing.

JUst had Girl In A Band delivered this afternoon so read the first chapter of that so might be the first thing I read from now with something being slightly put back. Looks very interesting, sorry to read the bitter feelings though.

now trying to decide whether i should read the last two thirds of finnegans wake or alternatively try to find where i got up to in tristram shandy

― no lime tangier, Wednesday, 20 January 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some ny resolutions you have made for yrself!