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

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

Finished Percival Everett, ERASURE (2001). Terrifically intelligent and challenging novel.

Love that book. He's an a,amazingly versatile writer. Have you read anything else of his?

I have not yet! But very impressed by this one. So much in it.

I was going to comment: I love KAFKA AMERICANA.

Knausgaard's comment above about death relating to the ground seemed not that ridiculous to me, on the face of it. But I haven't read his books and thus can't understand what he does or why, yet.

I just started Northanger Abbey last night. The straightforward pleasure of Austen's narrative voice is hard to beat.

Been trying to get back into reading for fun (yet again, I have breaks for various reasons, often involving academia or depression). Recent reads have involved some classics that I have inexplicably ignored, a couple of my beloved experimentals, and some things I never thought I would ever read but ended up loving.

A rough list of the last few months from memory:

Sophocles - Oedipus Rex + Oedipus at Colonus (not got around to Antigone yet)
Margaret Atwood - Oryx & Crake (goodish but a bit underwhelming, for some reason I never read the Handmaid's Tale at school so my mum has loaned me it to read soon)
James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
Raymond Roussel - Locus Solus
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Georges Perec - W, or the Memory of Childhood
Patrick Ness - Chaos Walking trilogy (my YA-loving friend lent these to me, they are young adult sci-fi books and I really really like them, got some quite high-concept stuff going on while remaining very accessible for kids/teens)
Christine Brooke-Rose - Xorandor (and just started Verbivore)

I think there might have been a couple of others recently that I have forgotten. That's one problem of getting back into reading at a relatively high speed (though I'm probably still slower than most of you) - I forgot that I need at least a couple of days between books to let them settle in. Also I have such a bad memory it's feasible that I might have posted about some of these before.

finished a cortázar collection from the late sixties/early seventies (a change of light & other stories). some almost straight up horror and hard-boiled pulp type stuff mixed in with the more recondite material... wasn't so sure about the one with the ghost of chopin thwarting the invasion of an unnamed latin american country, but otherwise some good stuff in there.

then some early bolaño: the skating rink & nazi literature in the americas (really liked the latter & going to have to find a copy of distant star)

now: perec's things, a story of the sixties

also, i really need to read some roussel!

Emil.y, i think you've hit some real gems in your return to reading! Giovannis room and invisible cities are wonderful books. And you remind me i need to dig out that christine brooke-rose book i bought when that thread about her was revived, and then never got round to reading.

Handmaids tale is not a perfect book, but still a very very effective one. By far her best SF work (though i say that as someone who thinks the rest of her SF is actually pretty risible)

Packing for a long spell of nomadism, think I can manage a bag of books (everything else goes into storage tomorrow). How do you decide what books to take? It's maddening. And I can't find anything in the damn boxes.

Might take Invisible Cities with me, if I can find it - one of my favourites.

no lime tangier, some Cortázar and Bolaño works coming up soon on my list of "books I bought ages ago but still haven't read", so I think we might have very similar reading interests. Definitely recommend Roussel, both Locus Solus and New Impressions of Africa.

I'd never read any James Baldwin before and adored Giovanni's Room, have since picked up some of his non-fiction, so hopefully will get around to that soon.

One book that I did forget to list was Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo - very sharp Afrofuturist satire with excellent formal elements.

I've read a couple of bolano's books, and I have 2666 or whatever sitting somewhere if I can find it. Grr.

hrabal is hilarious

He sure is.

I want to read James Baldwin later this year too.

So I finished Pages from the Goncourt Journals. So much in here, even though its very much the chronicle of two people who gave their lives to one thing: literature - partly because that's what they were good at (and not much else; women were such an obsession because they were a mystery - almost alien beings), but also because the stuff they were writing about like Flaubert and Zola was the stuff that 'won'. So while the subject is cult (Lit in general is a minority interest) they display a tabloid-like ear for both dialogue and speculation - people's lives and tribulations. A snatch of conversation that lingers on for long after you've read it. Something from his cousin:

Just imagine: they [the cousin's rural family] are people who for five generations have married for love

But there is are bits indicating a panorama of Paris in the 19th Century: one of the brothers - Jules - dies (at 39) Edmond carries on (3/4 of this is Edmond) and the entries surrounding his brother's death are touching and dignified. The Paris Commune starts up and this is chronicled as engagingly as what he is usually interested in.

But literature is what they gave themselves and there are insights at what the coming century will bring. The feud with Maupassant (his descent into madness and death doesn't stop Edmond from pissing away in his grave, but the charge of Flaubert minus sticks). There are snatches of a hilarious portrait of Mallarme, just this person that is beyond any comprehension. Edmond notes the weirdness of Baudelaire and so on. And then:

I am interested in novels in which I can feel the transcription in print, so to speak, of creatures in flesh and blood, in which I can read a little or a great deal of the memoirs of a life that has been lived

Where so much 20th century fic goes to (and where these Journals have been in although ironically you get a sense the life is often frustrating, in a they-are-rich-but-are-they-happy sorta way)

and regarding novels about high society:

...but unfortunately, to write novels or plays about that world you mustn't belong to it

Which is basically Proust.

I have finished some other things. Margerite Duras - The Vice-Consul. I love her devices for uncovering so much pain, but that whole world of people who went away (in this case to South Asia, where she grew up in) to get away and were lost. Almost dangerous in the wrong mood but the distancing and the drawing of characters who conceal as much as reveal keeps the reader marching on - the timing between both modes is really well done. The films based on this stuff just increase the fascination. Jean Rhys - Voyage in the Dark has sentences so worked over, which is v apt as it mirrors that sense of someone being suffocated, of being unable (and unwilling) to fit in - before outside forces inevitably distort and crush the already fragile sense of self and resistance and search for love and fulfillment. I've read a few of her fictions but also feel I am getting just started with Rhys. It takes time. Finally Han Kang - Human Acts. I loved The Vegetarian, where resistance and opposition was dramatised as a simple dietary switch. Here this is a lot more full-on, this time its a journalistic novel surrounding the repression of student uprisings in early 80s South Korea by the military government. I get it but also find it kinda stiff, kept thinking to my earlier read of Alexiviech's Voice of Chernobyl, how she is able to set and let oppressed voices fly away and speak and simply be whatever they are able to be at that time. Something I need to reflect more on.

Wow--loved 'The Vegetarian', didn't even know she had another book in English. It sounds interesting, even if not fully successful. Is it the same translator as Vegetarian?

Yeah, I should read more Duras, having loved The Lover, but maybe I haven't because I also found myself thinking that she knew a lot about guys like me. But finally---with most bridges, burned or not, having dissolved---what could words hurt-?

Also, have any of y'all read Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins? What did you think? And what's a good English translation of The Second Sex?

I've only read the Parshley translation, but according to Toril Moi, both of the available translations of The Second Sex have their problems (the earlier Parshley version is significantly abridged, while the newer version by Borde and Malovany-Chevallier is sometimes stilted and inaccurate): http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

han kang sounds like someone i need to read

i have been reading the wake. the novel in invented anglo saxon from a year or two ago, not the other thing

also eve babitz's memoir, which was delightful

renata adler's selected journalism or essays or whatever they called it, which as a collection was terribly organized (though i guess ... they had what they had) despite some fantastic writing. though the first couple pieces, the civil rights one and the israel one, seem ... curiously naive (or, possibly, so arch i'd totally failed to parse it); i'd put it down in frustation at those but the national guard and g. gordon liddy stuff was fantastic. i don't know if i needed 200 pages of jeremiads against the supreme court and the new york times, but they certainly weren't bad --

what else. zuleika dobson, re which: i am adopting a policy: if anyone tells you they think this book is not terrible, never trust them again

Wow--loved 'The Vegetarian', didn't even know she had another book in English. It sounds interesting, even if not fully successful. Is it the same translator as Vegetarian?

― like Uber, but for underpants (James Morrison), Monday, 29 February 2016 00:40 (9 hours ago) Permalink

Yes. Deborah Smith has started a press for fictions from the South Asia as well:

http://tiltedaxispress.com/

And I think she is doing a new book by Bae Suah too.

xposts: thanks for the roussel recommendations, emil.y... the little i know about his work comes via robbe-grillet's short essay and reading somewhere or other about the surrealists' early appreciation of him.

Knausgaard's comment above about death relating to the ground seemed not that ridiculous to me, on the face of it. But I haven't read his books and thus can't understand what he does or why, yet.

it was the ambiguity of his speculation about why this is that i found ridiculous, though i don't expect you to read posts.

Speaking of Northanger Abbey, I'm reading Frances Burney's Evelina.

Many similarities to Austen, although she seems to drag us even deeper into the madness, the rules upon rules of good manners, of language, interpreting meaning based on slight nods, shifts, having to live with snobs and fops of the most vapid kind who use and abuse these rules. Not to say it's an always subtle dance - the intensity with which the men of the book harass our heroine is something else - observing her fighting off one suitor after another is great fun, but also surprisingly violent. She paints a picture of a society where male sexual aggression taking even threatening physical form is the norm - in 'quality' upper class company. Of course she falls in love with the only guy in the book who isn't up in her face.

The book can be hysterically funny. What she definitely shares with Austen is the ability to make crystallized weapons out of sentences and build up to the most vivid descriptions of idiocy.

Great stuff.

Also a sweet peek into the fashionable London of the late 1700s with all its gardens and venues of entertainment.

When the curtain dropt they all rejoiced.

"How do you like it?"-and "How do you like it?" passed from one to another with looks of the utmost contempt. "As for me," said Mr. Branghton, "they've caught me once; but if ever they do again, I'll give 'em leave to sing me to Bedlam for my pains: for such a heap of stuff never did I hear: there isn't one ounce of sense in the whole opera, nothing but one continued squeaking and squalling from beginning to end."

"If I had been in the pit," said Madame Duval, "I should have liked it vastly, for music is my passion; but sitting in such a place as this, is quite unbearable."

Miss Branghton, looking at me, declared, that she was not genteel enough to admire it.

Miss Polly confessed, that, if they would but sing English, she would like it very well.

The brother wished he could raise a riot in the house, because then he might get his money again.

And, finally, they all agreed that it was monstrous dear.

evelina is a fantastic novel. captain mirvan's incessant trolling of lovel is a++.

And of course the only-sometimes innocent Evelina was "compelled to laugh" at his dirtiest trick.

yes, i love Evelina. that's the only Burney I've read.

I've got her journals and letters lined up next, but itching to read the next novel.

xposts: thanks for the roussel recommendations, emil.y... the little i know about his work comes via robbe-grillet's short essay and reading somewhere or other about the surrealists' early appreciation of him.

― no lime tangier, Monday, February 29, 2016 10:55 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If that's the guy I think it is I have a biography of him somewhere I bought a few years ago that I never read.
Isn't he the mega rich guy who supposedly travelled the world on a cruise ship but never left his cabin.

Made me think of l ron hubbard rather than roussel!

reading some good stuff

updike - of the farm
rupinder gill - on the outside looking indian
greg Jackson - prodigals

i always argue with a specific friend of mine about patents/ip law even though none of us know anything about is aside from intuition and folk anecdata (someone patented the peanut butter sandwich, etc) so i bought 3 books on patents/innovation policy and we're gonna cycle read them. i'm starting with the first

james bessen and michael j meurer - patent failure
- pro patents in theory but critical of practice especially since 90s when patent litigation has exploded. very empirical focus

michele boldrin and daniel k levine - against intellectual monopoly
true to their thesis this book is available for free download on their website http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

mariana mazzucato - the entrepreneurial state
less directly related to patents but more generally about the positive role of the state in innovation (internet, us gov actually made a profit off solyndra, etc etc)