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

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!

Tristram Shandy will be waaaaaay more rewarding

posted in the hope it will amuse you all as much as it amused me, a letter from Hunter S Thompson to Anthony Burgess...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CX73jDVU0AA4l4R.jpg

does burgess's non-clockwork stuff belong on the unfashionable writers thread? who the hell reads that stuff? and there is a lot of it too.

i just counted. 33 novels. and then there are 30+ other non-fiction things. and is any of it in print in the u.s. other than ACO? the U.K. is obviously a different kettle of kipper. is he big in europe still? i must know.

Also, i started the third in Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy. Ancillary Mercy.

xpost
Burgess def seems like one of those post-war Brits whose books are largely going out of print (the odd 'hit' like Clockwork Orange excepted) - Angus Wilson, William Cooper, John Braine, John Wain, even Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene.

The biography of Burgess by Roger Lewis is prob the most entertaining hatchet job I've ever read.

yeah, greene was in print here consistently for decades and now you would have a tough time finding anything new.

i mean i'm guessing that greene sold more in the u.s. than all those other people combined with the exception of clockwork which was a book that everyone had to buy even if they never read it.

with amis i would come across tons of paperbacks of lucky jim over the years and not much else. and he wrote a ton. even his kid doesn't seem that popular around these parts anymore. feel like london fields was the height of his popularity and that was quite a while ago.

There's a Europa edition of Earthly Powers in print. I finished it but didn't like it very much. I've read that and Clockwork and I don't think Burgess is a writer for me.

NYRB have been reissuing some Kingsley Amis, and I think they are going to issue a vol of his poetry

Burgess is a funny one - I think he's got a little cult still, people with a real mania for Earthly Powers in particular (met someone recently who's read it like 6 times, it's their favourite book), but yeah… he wrote so much, but I've only ever really seen Earthly Powers, Clockwork Orange, the Enderby novels and Nothing Like the Sun knocking about in shops.

his books are still in plentiful supply here in secondhand book shops, anyhow. other than clockwork think i've only read his 60's bond knock-off/parody tremor of intent. do have a copy of 1985 but looking through it seems like it's nothing but an old reactionary's lament for the way of the world.

Nothing Like the Sun and Dead Man in Deptford (his Christopher Marlowe novel) both hold up well, and I see Earthly Powers in used bookstores fairly often, but among my reader friends I don't really ever hear him talked about outside the context of Clockwork Orange.

Oh, and Re Joyce is one of the better introductions to Joyce I've read (I don't know what this says about its availability now, but I remember having it at hand during my first time going through Ulysses as a teenager).

Bowie otm re Earthly Powers.

Yes in my 2nd hand trawls the Burgess I come across the most are intros to Joyce.

sometimes see copies of that truncated fw that he edited, and just wonder what the purpose of doing that would be? never looked inside, so maybe it has valuable editorial matter...

Best novels of his I've read are Earthly Powers a Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and a few others from the same era: Honey For The Bears and The Doctor Is Sick.

Oh and search the first volume of the autobio Little Wilson and Big God. But destroy the second volume You've Had Your Time. Follows the classic pattern of: this it is was really like to be me in the Old Weird AmericaBritain, End of Book I, *Fame and *Fortune, Remarriage* Begin Book II And then I wrote... Darn these kids, etc.

if anyone can ever find burgess's intro to the u.k. edition of last exit to brooklyn online lemme know. be interested in reading that.

I've read maybe six or seven books by Burgess. I especially liked the first of his Enderby books, and generally found his novels to be competently written with just enough intellectual skew to give them added point and interest.

He was smart and well read, and it showed, but that's never really enough on its own, is it? He had an idiosyncratic set of opinions and prejudices, but the majority of them were reactionary and backward-facing. The best I can say for him is that he never wrote a book Oprah could endorse.

btw, I am currently reading a large collection of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the Library of America compilations.

william golding will likewise always have one book in print in the states. man do we love that one book though.

Heh, just the other day I was reading the Paris Review interview with Gore Vidal and was surprised by this part:

VIDAL

I wouldn’t say that I am fanatically attentive. There’s only one living writer in English that I entirely admire, and that’s William Golding. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Italian and French writers. I particularly like Italo Calvino.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think Golding good?

VIDAL

Well, his work is intensely felt. He holds you completely line by line, image by image. In The Spire you see the church that is being built, smell the dust. You are present at an event that exists only in his imagination. Very few writers have ever had this power. When the priest reveals his sores, you see them, feel the pain. I don’t know how he does it.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever met him?

VIDAL

Once, yes. We had dinner together in Rome. Oxford don type. I like his variety: Each book is quite different from the one before it. This confuses critics and readers, but delights me. For that reason I like to read Fowles—though he is not in Golding’s class. Who else do I read for pleasure? I always admire Isherwood. I am not given to mysticism—to understate wildly, but he makes me see something of what he would see. I read P. G. Wodehouse for pleasure. Much of Anthony Burgess.

interesting to see that vidal rated fowles (somewhat). & speaking of, there's a nice appreciation of golding in his wormholes collection of essays/occasional pieces.

yeah I've picked up a few burgess books 2nd hand but only read enderby & clockwork orange, earthly powers appeals to me & I keep meaning to read it. picked up a book of essays embarrassingly titled homage to qwertyuiop and iirc the 1st essay was moaning about feminism and I stopped reading, this may be an unfair (semi)recollection tho. I liked his listicle book about the best novels since the war

99 Novels? That is fun.

I'm proud that I finally finished L. Randall Wray's Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems, over a bit of a winter break, along with volume one of Descartes' Philosophical Writings (Cambridge). Wray doesn't write very well, but this seems to be the only book length summary of modern monetary theory (MMT) at least for the general public. I also started a couple books by Abba Lerner (one of the foundational figures for MMT), but am going to need to backtrack in one fo them since I was reading it in doctor's offices and car service waiting areas, where I couldn't concentrate. Lerner is actually a very enjoyable writer, if a little twee at times.

Not sure I will be able to finish off anything of that sort until the next time I have extended time off, unfortunately.

burgess's two autobiographical vols are excellent, and I liked A Dead Man in Deptford a *lot* when it came out, but haven't really returned to it since. Read a number of other things (Any Old Iron, Honey for the Bears) and they're... not v compelling. That feeling you get with Nabokov, where it feels like his eye is on something else, a separate and only partial visible set of mechanisms influencing the main events, which in Nabokov often works extremely well, in Burgess gives a feeling of... I was going to say detachment, but it's not quite the right word - they don't speak very directly though.

Current/recent reading:

Love in a Dish by MFK Fisher. A really enjoyable set of essays on food, eating and taste. you feel the importance of qualities in life, and of being able to show sensual discernment. judgment and decision-making well-informed by ones affections and tastes.
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart. Again, tremendously enjoyable, intelligent and informative, with an underlying peculiarity of personality. Written before he became a Tory pol, but I couldn't help continually trying to square that with what I was reading. Setting that to one side he is an extremely competent writer - stage managing, for instance, the first example of a dead goat polo match in Afghanistan since the removal of Taliban government extremely well. Some sections rise something above that:

On a blanket on a mud roof, a large dog still slept, the night’s snowfall dusting his coat. While I looked at the dog, a small group of boys looked at me. It was two hours’ walk to their nearest neighbour, so the children spent all their time with their cousins. When they were fifteen or so, they married their cousins.

Still, it's not really about style. Stewart's descriptions of his experience walking through the interior of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, in 2002 is totally compelling. He is adventurous to the point of folly, to the point of a mania or pathology in fact. Several times it seems like he's deliberately courting foreseeable death either by weather or violence. As I say, it's hard not to speculate about him - there's that mania for walking, something that looks like a wish for annihilation either through religious reverie or death, the kinship, noted a couple of times, between Scottish border country, with its windy dwellings and community headmen, and Afghanistan. There's his close and unsentimental sympathy for the people he hosts, and his clear intelligence and judgment. A stated major factor in him becoming a politician was to campaign against ill-informed institutional intervention in Afghan politics. There's his High Tory Catholicism (which I infer from him mentioning having a rosary, but I may have misread) - that's a combination which I associate still with concealed intellectual alienation. There are obvious comparisons to people like TE Lawrence. He's not stupid, but suspicions remain that he extrapolates distrust of national institutions in Afghanistan to distrust of them in the very different circumstances of Britain. He's been successful and not stupid in the areas of broadband legislation and environmental infrastructure though. I presume he participates in that conservatism that says people are happier within existing structures, an argument used too often against reform, and post-thatcher results in a deliberate and atavistic conversion of social structures into cash for chancers, corporate business and landlords.

Anyway, it's an excellent read and very informative on the way very domestic and tribal Afghan politics intersects with international politics.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Started and enjoyed, but put down. I'm a little bit suspicious of such free-flowing observations, but it's done with vim and concision, so I'll probably pick up again. I really like her manner of including quotations within the body of her text only as italics, with a marginal note to indicate source.

Europe at Midnight - Dave Hutchison. Second book in trilogy discussed in previous thread. I enjoyed reading it a lot, though I'm struggling to remember anything significant I wanted to say about it now. In recollection its shifting allegiances and fragmentary plots feel messy, but that wasn't really the experience of reading it.

A readable paper on some of Lerner's ideas (not that anyone asked):

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp272.pdf

Interesting and perceptive comments on The Places In Between. I enjoyed that quite a bit when I read it several years ago. Apart from his occasional essays in the NY Review of Books, none recently though, I haven't really kept up with his career since then.

The Places In Between by Rory Stewart. Again, tremendously enjoyable, intelligent and informative, with an underlying peculiarity of personality. Written before he became a Tory pol, but I couldn't help continually trying to square that with what I was reading.

Just read Alan Bennett's diary in the LRB, where he said almost exactly the same thing. sounds great! (the book, not being a tory MP)

Speaking of post-Kentuckians, one way, have you read Mary Gaitskill, and if so, what did you think? (question from another ex-resident, though not native)

just finished jd salinger's collected stories - the highs were high, the lows were still p good but a little boring. particularly liked "the laughing man".

now i have a big backlog of books since i did a kind of winter panic binge in the same way as i do with wine/beer/whiskey/rich tinned food - not sure what i'll start next.

just been to the excellent cosmonauts exhibition at the science museum and want to read a load of russian sci-fi or experimental lit. haven't read sorokin so might just go for the ice trilogy. recommendations wd be good tho.

did start Shredded, the apparently v good account of the clusterfuck at RBS, yesterday, but as I say my heart is elsewhere right now.

Speaking of post-Kentuckians, one way, have you read Mary Gaitskill, and if so, what did you think? (question from another ex-resident, though not native)

― dow, Sunday, January 24, 2016 1:15 AM

dow, I've read a little of Gaitskill's work: Bad Behavior, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, out of which Veronica is probably my favorite. Two Girls handles abuse and struggles with embodiment powerfully and unsentimentally, but its ending felt too neat with the two protagonists fumbling toward connection without the novel really dealing with the messiness of that kind of intimacy, so I appreciate Gaitskill's more complex treatment of conflictual friendship in the later novel. The Mare doesn't have the most promising premise, but I would like to read it this year.

The Mare was pretty good: imagine an As I Lay Dying structure giving order to a National Velvet horse story. She creates one of the more convincing moms in recent lit memory.

I don't really clamor for new horse stories, Alfred, but the rest of yr description does sound appealing.

i remember not liking two girls but it was ages ago. wasn't there an ayn rand character in that book? bad behavior is a cool time capsule though. read that first. kinda her best in my humble internet opinion...but again haven't read it in decades.

Her short stories are marvels imo

veronica might be one of my favorite novels. i came to mary gaitskill through her amazing granta essay from 2009, "lost cat". apparently it's now paywalled on the granta site, but someone has reposted it <a href="https://catastrophysicist.wordpress.com/lost-cat-by-mary-gaitskill/";>here</a>

yikes, forgot to convert that to bbcode.

anyway, this isn't fully formed but: "sensitive" always seems to me like the most apt word to describe her writing, and one of the things that i like/find interesting about it is the way her characters can seem almost psychically empathic in ways that make me think of theories of affect. the lost cat essay definitely reflects that radical sensitivity (altho it also makes clear her biggest weaknesses)

Bad Behaviour was one of my great discoveries of last year. "Heaven," in particular, is shattering.

fizzles, rs' dad's telegraph obituary is worth reading

Fizzles probably knows these already, but the Strugatsky Brothers (ie Hard to Be a God, Roadside Picnic) are great. There's a Theodore Sturgeon-edited Soviet SF anthology that's also very good.

Don't think I'd ever read any Gaitskill before the (sensitive, empath, even) onslaught of Because They Wanted To, femme top and all. This is back when I was reading nothing but short stories---no novels, that is; couldn't take the time to get that involved---but What a collection. That's what got me back into contemporary fiction.
Another unexpected express ride, just recently: Amazon's Look Inside option gave me a whole amazingly compressed, eloquent essay from The Essential Ellen Willis: born in 1941 to intelligent, educated blue collar parents in Queens, her childhood ambition is to be a smart, successful, no-BS man---and a dish, an adorable woman of the world. So there she is at 20, receiving her degree---and already married, despite her reservations. Wants to be a Writer--but off to Africa, because hubbie accepts a job there, working for Uncle Sam. Still, she had a glimpse in Berkeley: she secretly considers herself an anarchist, in the gestalt/consciousness-raising sense: no good to be a libertarian if you can't liberate the minds nad bodies of (insert your own example the budding Koch brothers,for instance) among many other self-styled radicals who want to replace one kind of authortarianism with another whether they realize it or not. And: many, though certainly not all, of these people are---men.
She never uses sexism as an alibi, but does, in a few pages, map her own experience, and others observed, in trying to find a way through the conundrums and double binds of gender roles-- via Relationship, office and/or antiwar movement politics---up through the year of publication, 1969. The ending is in mid-flight, mid-war.
Talent and professional skills are required to write like this, but you can't really write like this: you write your own version of it, if and when you can live it, passionately and and compulsively and coherently truthfully enough to testify.

Also with more punctuation (sorry).