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

I haven't read that specific selection of Berger's essays, dow, but a lot of his writings from the sixties through the eighties are among my favorite works of art criticism (as an outsider to that field, at least); at his best, he's able to make the act of looking remarkably vivid (as that reviewer says) while maintaining a dynamic sense of historical context.

read milan kundera - laughter and forgetting this week. i loved the author when i was in high school but i've pretty much lost the taste for it.

Mildly curious to have a go at one of Berger's novels - probably has to be G.. Anyone read it?

Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, an overwhelming experience. Most things I read can be considered sad (even depressing but I don't think about it in those terms) but because its re-cast as fiction - which has that effect to protect you so that you can get inside the horror, or simply serves as material to be mastered. Nothing like that here. Alexiviech gives you no breathing space as you find yourself inside a collage of decay, irresponsibility and destruction, and a destruction of everything - humans, animals, plants, children, food. In the end there is something of the writer as editor of people - she allows them their voice, but its much better than a mere documentary in her re-workings. Look forward to more sometime. Moved onto Josef Winkler's When the Time Comes which convincingly at the Genet-like transcendence, the collage here is of death and pain, but its done with such artfulness and prose-poetic rhythm that you keep turning the pages. Images are continuously re-thought - death is looked at telescopically in these images that make it sound almost attractive (the body is simply returned to the earth, its so normal it happens all the time, like life) and yet it is all collages in this inorganic manner too - all seems like a painting (and a medieval one too, at times I thought this was sent hundreds of years ago instead of the mid-20th century). He is the kind of writer tnat you need to live inside for several books at a time (if you can bear it) so I'm looking forward to reading Garden of Bitter Oranges when its published later this year.

NYRB Winter Sale---50 books at 50% off (wondering about Poets In A Landscape and Pages From The Goncourt Journals)

Started on The Goncourt Journal! Its compulsive reading atm: a mixture of acid bitchyness, passges of excellent crit (the way they lay into Flaubert after a reading of Salammbo, whom they otherwise have much affection for). Also has plenty of misogny - which in turn reflects on various inadequacies - the men as portrayed here can't stop talking about women. Must've been a key text for Proust.

There's a really virtuosic pastiche of the Goncourt journals late in Recherche, iirc. (I mean, I think it's virtuosic but haven't read enough of the actual brothers to properly judge.)

Alexievich does sound like a harrowing writer, xyzzzz__; I'll have to come around to her.

Yeah, that Chernobyl book, it really really got to me. Frequently quite horrific. Annoyingly, I see it's coming out soon in the UK in a revised/updated/expanded edition, so I seem to have been harrowed by the inferior version.

The Dalkey Archive version is pretty good. I don't know what 'superior' would mean.

ows - in a sense she gets across a raw suffering (which is a cliche peculiar to Russian Lit). She presents things as they appear to have been in a documentary fashion but is also able to cast the net sideways (bits on how Chehkov and Tolstoy - as good as they are - are useless as offering anything to the readers then). Its a bit like the film Come and See. Klimov said somewhere that he didn't show everything, otherwise people wouldn't be able to stand it. Comparison of media aside (and I know its a big aside) Alexiviech probably goes a bit further, as she can show by writing it in a piece of paper and possibly trusts her readers to be able to withstand it some more because: 1) we are far away from it, reading and 2) its harder to picture things in your mind off the page. That 2nd point is more personal, I can switch that off.

This really has a feel of science fic at times.

Flopson -- I'm reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, too -- my first Kundera. Shortly after checking it out from the library, I met a young woman who had just read it for a class. Must be something in the air...

There's a really virtuosic pastiche of the Goncourt journals late in Recherche, iirc. (I mean, I think it's virtuosic but haven't read enough of the actual brothers to properly judge.)

― one way street, Tuesday, 16 February 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One more thing: I think the Goncourt's are all over Recherche... There is a Proust account on twitter - basically someone re-writing Proust as tweets, and for a lot of the time it could double as a Goncourt twitter.

This really has a feel of science fic at times.

Speaking of which I really enjoyed Roadside Picnic. Can't believe I hadn't read it before in fact as I've been peripherally aware of it for a while. It's great at leaving lacunae into which you can project, which in itself is the nature of the Zone.

In addition it's populated by people trying to get by in life, in the normal way, in a totally destabilised environment. Something PDK does well too - people have jobs and needs and families etc. One of the best books I've read I think.

Also read some Khlebnikov prose, which was quite futurist in many of its PROCLAMATIONS about MACHINES, but also contained some stark landscapes and proto-science fiction material as no lime tangier said. Only I wasn't very compis mentis when I read it as I'd given myself a fucking huge headache by playing bloodborne for too long, and I kept on getting the landscapes confused (crypto-Lovecraftian cities of monstrosities superimposed onto futuristic pre-revolutionary industrial russia) so I'm going to give it another proper go next week.

The Zone is referred to in Voices of Chernobyl btw. But it also discusses Chernobyl as the end of physics.

"Flopson -- I'm reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, too"

it's because i mentioned him on that unfashionable writer thread. i spoke his name and now he is alive...

Just got 1966 by jon Savage through the post. Not really had a chance to do more than give it a peripheral look, BUt am seriously looking forward to reading it.

Very favorable Christgau review, posted now on his site, of the 2-CD musical companion to Savage's book, with more tracks than the songs commented on in the latter, I'm told (additional commentary in the CD booklet).

I'm gonna order the Berger books I mentioned (already got xpost G, high time I read that too), and an amazingly inexpensive Robert Walser New Directions book with tipped-in art, mentioned in this amazingly amazing view of ND's pocket universe (also need to get Beauty Is A Wound, based on description here)
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-staying-small-helps-new-directions-publish-great-books?mbid=nl_160216_Daily&CNDID=27752069&spMailingID=8551884&spUserID=MTA5MjQwNTU0OTUwS0&spJobID=861641249&spReportId=ODYxNjQxMjQ5S0

Having read another 60 pages of Thirty Years War I can definitely say that Peter Wilson is not an unusually gripping storyteller. I'll keep ploughing ahead, but I very much doubt I'll plough to the end.

I've read C. V. Wedgewood's Thirty Years War, which was fairly readable (and somewhat shorter than Wilson's). I guess the drawback is that it's missing the latest scholarship. It did a good job of sketching the different phases of the conflict, major battles, motivations of various rulers and generals, and high-level politics. What I felt like it was missing was a vivid sense of what life was like for a soldier, peasant or burgher caught up in the war. I intend to read Simplicissimus at some point, which hopefully delivers a bit more of that.

New Strugatsky Brothers translation coming in a few months, 'The Doomed City': http://www.amazon.com/Doomed-City-Arkady-Strugatsky/dp/1613749937/ref=sr_1_1/177-0272354-7602832?ie=UTF8&qid=1455746192&sr=8-1&keywords=strugatsky+doomed

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel they worked hardest on, the novel that was their own favorite, the novel that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English.

The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia during perestroika in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of major European languages, and now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.

The Doomed City is set in an experimental city whose sun gets switched on in the morning and switched off at night, bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from twentieth-century history at various times and places and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though his first job in the city is as a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

wow, sounds great. i really like the postscripts in the editions I've been reading about how they had to fight through the institutional and cultural stupidities to get what they could published. in hard to be a god one of them (I can't remember which, Arkady?) says to his brother - i just want to write Dumas style swashbuckler with cardinals and sword fighting! no satire! and so his brother relents and they write it. then there's a bout of concerted cultural and journalistic attacks on the arts, dictating what should and shouldn't be written, and Beria's denouncing decadence, so they rewrite with a Don Rebia purging an alien medieval land of all enlightenment (later changed to Don Reba). bloody odd book of course for that very reason, but enjoyable.

This one, posted by James Morrison on Rolling Speculative etc, is billed as a century of science fiction from Russia and the Soviet Union (just came out a couple months ago, James says):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016C3KATY?ref_=pd_ys_nr_all_8

started roadside picnic last night after the mentions here. in 3 pages it explains more than the film ever does.

Lol

andrei voronin, a young astronomer plucked from leningrad in the 1950s

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01556/andriy_voronin_1556340a.jpg

Speaking of New Directions in the New Yorker, ND's going to publish a new Delmore Schwartz collection; here's Ashbery's intro, which I meant to just skim but couldn't:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-heavy-bear-on-delmore-schwartz?intcid=mod-latest

Cool!

Ordered some more Carter Sholz from the library. Will report later, I guess.

Just started more Carter Scholz myself: a short collection of stories he wrote with Jonathan Lethem about Kafka ('Kafka Americana')--best one so far has Kafka getting TB treatment and moving to the US to become a scriptwriter for Frank Capra

Sounds good. Had requested that one too, still Pending and not yet In Transit.

speaking of the New Yorker, i was visiting my parents and my dad had bought that hardcover collection of 50's new yorker stuff and i wish i had stolen it from him. lotsa gold in there.

Read more Kafka Americana at lunch, another great Scholz story has Kafka, Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives all at an insurance sales conference in some vast inescapable European hotel

From the description alone I like.

Feel like I used to own a copy of that book but never read all of it, or maybe I read one of the stories in some other venue, "K is for Kafka," is that one?

Yeah, 'K for Fake', riffing on Orson Welles--it was in an issue of McSweeney's, too, according to the copyright info

Yesterday I picked up a well-designed, nicely printed hard cover collection of selections of Thomas Carlyle that was put out around 1950 as part of The Reynard Library, which was a very nicely done series. This copy was in very good condition with a dust jacket, for $2.

So, I read the first selection last night, an essay "Signs of the Times". TC was a gifted haranguer, but he spoiled whatever value his ideas had by affixing them to the most extreme hardline position he could achieve, so whatever was reasonable in them is mixed up with total nonsense and spoiled.

i'm reading a ton of things at once as per usual, but also doing a writing class at faber, and this week the teacher gave us karl ove knausgaard, like i think the opening of the first book. apart from ruining my streak of having read all the stories he'd given us and seeming like the wanker mature student of a 12-week class - i find it p interesting.

i mean, some of his observations are brilliant, but parts of it also seem facile, stupid, or poorly explored.

for instance (and this nearly ruined the whole thing for me, insofar as it's a six-page sample that was finished when i finished it)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cb23i4TW0AEw8E0.jpg

i mean... is he really, REALLY incapable of finding a simple reason, besides cellar coolness, as to why a funeral home might not be on the eighth floor of a building and an insurance office would? like damn this wooden box full a 15-stone policy is a nightmare to move.

are the books full of this kind of thing? i'm aware this is pedantry but this was so bad as to make me a lot more suspicious of the rest...

I gave up on Karl O. K. after ~200 pages of the first volume of My Struggle. He didn't seem to have much to say and took his own sweet time to say it. His digressions into broad social observation struck me as particularly useless.

My current book is Kipling's first novel, The Light That Failed, which he wrote at age 24. It is an interesting mixture, exhibiting the pacing of a born storyteller and flashes of excellent style, all muddled up with a lot of juvenile posturing and painfully immature judgment.

The Light That Failed is very enjoyable, but you're otm about the posturing etc. Still well worth reading, though. Seems to be out of print, which is a bit of a surprise.

i don't think that's pedantry in the slightest tbh; it undermines the total observation. also you lose trust in the author (not just in the quality if their observations, but in the intellectual materials they've used to construct their world), and if you're going to spend a lot of time in his company that's fatal. xpost to LG.

currently reading Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. it's good. has as its principle "what it is that is deep about magic would be kept" and criticizes Frazer for categorizing the magical and religious notions of the peoples he writes about as "mistakes".

Fizzles that Wittgenstein sounds amazing, is it in German or English?

Also I agree that the Knausgaard seems like an essay-novel in the Musil tradition, but minus the intelligence, to the point of veering into Literary Seinfeldism: "What's the deal with morgues?" & so forth

Currently reading The Atrocity Exhibition; forever uncertain what to think of it, or how to feel; perpetually on the brink of setting it on a bench somewhere & walking away fast

Holy smokes, there's a Wicker Man on the cover of that Wittgenstein book!

Upcoming edition anyway.

German with facing-page translation. It's very very slender. What's good about it is the fairly light application of methods of philosophical thought you get in Philosophical Investigations - the care not to see causation in proximity - to a quite focused area. It's all quite liberating, every paragraph has you saying 'yes!' and punching the air slightly:

Even the idea of trying to explain the practice - say the killing of the priest-king - seems to me wrong-headed. All that Frazer does is to make this practice plausible to people who think as he does. It is very queer that all these practices are finally presented, so to speak, as stupid actions.

But it never does become plausible that people do all this out of sheer stupidity.

When he explains to us, for example, that the king must be killed in his prime because, according to the notion of the savages, his soul would not be kept fresh otherwise, we can only say: where that practice and these views go together, the practice does not spring from the view, but both of them are there.

funny, i was thinking about The Atrocity Exhibition yesterday - was reading Benjamin's essay on Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, which contains a section on World Exhibitions:

World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value recedes into the background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. The entertainment industry makes this easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. he surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others. .. World exhibitions propagate the universe of commodities.

I didn't really get round to applying this to Ballard particularly, though it feels kin, as does this bit in fact:

Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service.

Have to be careful though, "similar words used in a similar way" does not equal "the same". i did end up here because of a comment on form and function in High Rise, so am just letting all percolate through at the moment.

I too was just now thinking about Ballard, but it was while I was staring at this picture. Aviation, crashes, filming, death.

i like those long articles i have read by knausgaard but there is no way i would ever read those books. would much rather read kipling. so maybe he is the new DFW for me. will read his wide-eyed reportage, but don't need the fiction.

i have been ignoring all the talk about him, so the concept was p fascinating to me when i heard about it. but yeah i dunno if i would read the books, that bit i screengrabbed annoyed me too much.

i'm still reading 2nd volume of ferrante but i also picked up francis davis's Like Young and i couldn't put it down and man he really sends me that francis davis. he's so good.

lmao @ literary seinfeldism

i like those long articles i have read by knausgaard but there is no way i would ever read those books.

vol.5 and/or 6 is about Brevik and Hitler, a section of that sounds like one of those excellent essays he has been knocking off so I am looking forward to that.

Thanks for Wittgenstein's still very relevant take on Frazer, Fizzles. Recalls my impressions of Dawkins, Maher, Hitchens and many lesser lights on Isalm, for inst.

I also like this:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/modernism_in_sf

Even better, I think:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/postmodernism_and_sf

Lots of links in those; I just now read this, which seems pretty astute:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ballard_j_g

I too was just now thinking about Ballard, but it was while I was staring at this picture🔗. Aviation, crashes, filming, death.

why i want to fuck noel edmonds.

it's the trad ballard plot - smith is the professional drawn into the orbit of the charismatic psychopath edmonds, climax is Smith crashing a helicopter with his wife beside him.

this fits somewhere