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

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).

Stewart had at times considered a parliamentary career. He had discussed with friends an idea that might help prepare him: he would live in a housing project for two or three years, to better understand British poverty. (It frustrates him that he never did this.)

As a student, Stewart liked to turn the mundane into the extraordinary: when he wounded his hand on a broken champagne bottle, he asked to be stitched without anesthesia. Emily Bearn, a British journalist, has written of an evening in Oxford, when he wandered into a room and recited poetry while she was throwing up into a wastebasket.

#wildTimes

ppl got very into his speech about hedgehogs.

I think I basically like having him around.

That Middleland thing he and the BBC cobbled together in the middle of the Scottish independence referendum was a right load of old pony though.

thanks for the recommendations, James. I think I had the Theodore Sturgeon collection in mind without realising it - remembering getting it out of the library when i was in my v heavy SF phase, but don't remember much apart from the cover.

also, never read any of the brothers Strugatsky, so have immediately purchased those!

also, don't mind having rs around, but feel those "what does it *feel* like to be a human being" experiements in empathy and experience are salutary. its mistake is perhaps not all that serious, and I'm sure rs is aware of it, but it lies in the difference between something experienced through choice and the same thing experienced through birth, accident or whatever fate is.

his father's obit (thanks nakh - it was good), indicates the same spirit - it is the distancing effect of being able to experience many things. still, he doesn't seem too much of a cunt and clearly has a desire to use what he learns for the benefit of others as well as learning for the benefit of himself.

just been to the excellent cosmonauts exhibition at the science museum and want to read a load of russian sci-fi or experimental lit.

if not too early for what you're looking for: think some of khlebnikov's prose might just reach the outer-realms of sf. definitely qualifies for the experimental part, anyway.

cheers nlt. in fact i think that may hit the nail on the head as the way the early part if the exhibition is curated focuses on how the artistic imagination of kazimir malevich and ilya chashnik was converted into impulses towards and visions of the cosmos that were then scientifically and culturally realised. it's that abstraction, extreme to the point of mysticism, (and often with a lot of odd hokum in there - blavatsky always seems present) that's interesting, as it feels like they came to drive a wider cultural purpose and define its peculiar character.

also with the rs thing, I've realised i was trying to say that people such as stewart have a tremendous and only partially realised desire to *belong* - there's a bit in the book where a british soldier calls him a fucking nutter and he's delighted at the praise: he likes the mess room company of soldiers. anyway, that's surely enough about him.

I really enjoyed a mid-60s paperback, Paths In The Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction, which had 0 editorial & translator credits (intro by noteworthy American SF anthologist-author Judith Merrill, who is amazed by short-term quality leap in Soviet SF as represented here, but she's frustrated by some of the translations, which I had no prob with, as a total ignoramus). I talked about several of these stories on the older (b. 2011) Rolling Science Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative etc.

damn i really need to get on to that thread but yet again i failed to get on it when it started and am now daunted by its length. will check out your posts, dow.

David Thomson's "How to watch a movie"

Presumably, in his case, it's best done while masturbating furiously over Nicole Kidman in a nude scene

ugh

François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy.

I have nearly finished Antony Beevor's WWII book. I feel this is a massive achievement.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/sep/24/biography.film. To give some context to my distasteful remark. Or any Thomson book that mentions Kidman, really.

I know the context.

I picked up Hume's Treatise, which I've never read in full. It's pretty dazzling. There must be upwards of a thousand individual arguments in this book. It's fun getting into his system and seeing how everything flows from his basic distinction between impressions and ideas, which itself he's only able to articulate as a difference in degree.

Couldn't it be like, "I get the impression that you're avoiding me; here's my idea about why, and my idea about how such relationships as ours are affected by technology," ideas which also come from impressions, and somewhere else (judging by the gaps, leaps past the empirical and experiential, or so it seems)."

"Also my idea about why I mess up punctuation in posts, but not emails."

There's no mention of wanking over Nicole Kidman in the Thomson book but it is dreadful for other various reasons