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

Frederick Philip Grove, Over Prairie Trails
Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line

Thanks for getting back to me about the translation, tangenttangent. Re the 2666 (and other) experience, the Bolano thread is worth checking. It changes after "The Part About The Crimes": some of the characters from previous sections reappear, engaged in their usual pursuits, obsessions, etc,, but nothing is ever the same, because the sense of something monstrous and clinical and ultra(?)-obsessive is under the surface/between the walls, exerting pressure but never surfacing, in subsequent sections; and some of the characters rail against, it but there's no release. Reminds me of a version of "All Along The Watchtower" I saw Dylan and the boys doing one time, back in the 90s. In the book and the performance, there were fluctuations on the exertion of pressure, but that just increased the tension.
I took it that this is Bolano's version of The Way We Live Now, or anyway the way we live now, and the feeling of pressure he had while writing, and knowing (at some point during this project) that he was mortally ill.

And I think it's the afterword where someone states that Bolano wanted the sections to be published separately, hoping to maximize his children's inherited royalties.

I've been reading Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins.

I've started in on The Big Short. Lewis sure knows how to construct a narrative that propels your interest. The arrogance, ignorance and general sleaze of most Wall Street traders is no surprise and therefore after you're done getting angry at them they are essentially uninteresting, so Lewis focuses on a few traders who are atypical, surprising and capable of holding your interest.

polished off "my lunches with orson" in two days, now onto "class" by paul fussell

I've been reading Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins.

― o. nate, Monday, March 28, 2016 9:31 PM

This is the one by the purported liberal, right?

Sonia Shah: Pandemic -- fascinating history of cholera, using it as a springboard to look at pandemics and their effects on human biology/history/society, etc

Granddaddy of all pandemic books was Plagues and Peoples, Wm. McNeill. It launched a thousand ships, so to speak.

curious to hear what you think of Big Short, Aimes. i read it this January and really liked it.

I found it wasn't actually as good at explaining the finance stuff as some reviews claim. I think Lewis assumes the reader is bored by that stuff (what a CDS actually is) so he over-compensates with focus on the foibles and quirks of the characters' personalities. also i remain a bit unclear about each individual's contributions, a lot o people i know who read the book or saw the movie came out of it thinking the Cornwall Capital guys were somehow responsible for the crash, which is really not the case. i don't think Lewis ever explicitly says that, but i can see how it's unclear enough that someone could walk away thinking that

I'm about halfway through The Big Short. afaics, Lewis only explains as much of the financial stuff as he thinks is necessary for his readers to feel they have a bare grasp of what is going on. I am guessing there are far better 'explainer' books out there that lay it out in much greater depth and detail. All Lewis really wants you to walk away with is the unshakable belief that the global financial system is run entirely by thieves and charlatans. He succeeds in this.

This is the one by the purported liberal, right?

Diggins is hard to pigeonhole. He described himself as "to the right of the Left and to the left of the Right".

A couple of interesting pieces about him:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/man-in-the-middle-john-patrick-diggins
https://newrepublic.com/article/71889/john-patrick-diggins-1935-2009

The book is interesting because it recasts Reagan as an Emersonian romantic and as a liberal in certain key aspects. It tries to understand the roots of his political philosophy and how he governed. Overall it's a fairly sympathetic look, but also clear-eyed about his shortcomings.

All Lewis really wants you to walk away with is the unshakable belief that the global financial system is run entirely by thieves and charlatans. He succeeds in this.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, 29 March 2016 17:22 (1 hour ago) Permalink

Huh, this wasn't really my impression. I got a sense more of genuine ignorance at complexity of the housing loan contracts, plus the fucked up incentives of the loan rating agencies (as well as the incentive to remain ignorant of what was in the loans in the first place), than individual malice. Which I liked because thinking of Finance as just a bunch of villains makes it hard to think about how to reform it. Shame that he left he whole agency problem of investment/shadow banking to like the last page of the afterword.

List with brief comments, some intriguing, others not(but dammit why can't I remember to get The Art of Memory?):

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/t-magazine/entertainment/my-10-favorite-books-simon-critchley.html?WT.mc_id=D-NYT-MKTG-MOD-30555-03-29-HD&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_c=

Michael Bloch - Closet Queens
Will Cuppy - The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

Jean Rhys - After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. There is no heartbreak or disappointment - Rhys' amin characters get just what they expect out of people which is exactly zilch. Nada. Certainly worse. And its a world you are happy to swim in because the writing is so good. In some ways Wide Sargasso Sea might be her only bad book - although I should revisit - it made not that much of an impression. Working back from Good Morning, Midnight is really working, even if I had to start it over again I'd do so from the beginning. Looking forward to two more books of short stories and Quartet later this year.

Tanizaki - In Praise of Shadows. At first its an innocent looking short essay on Japanese aesthetics. There is a shadow of nationalism running through it, a longing for what was and can never be again.

Rhys's Tigers are Better-looking is extraordinary, I think, and Sleep it Off, Lady is slighter but still haunting at times in the way of increasingly skeletal late writing.

Excellent.

When you've exhausted Rhys's own books, it's quite interesting to read her one (that I know of) translation, Francis Carco's 'Perversity': it's nowhere near as good as her own stuff, but you can see why it appealed to her.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/95/1f/30/951f30e03eb93fa82ec8e35cf93428dc.jpg

Rhys's collected letters, edited by Diana Athill, are worth looking at, but maybe not read in full, since they basically boil down to "O poor me, I canot cope, I need money, i can't do anything for myself, o alack alas" and that wears you out after a couple of hundred pages. Athill writes movingly and entertainingly about Rhys in 'Stet'--she was her editor and frequent helper for quite some time.

Well I am looking at reading a vol of Van Gogh's letters later in the year so that might be ok.

Ha! Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo? They're wonderful.

Yeah.

Pat Barker - Life Class
Gary Donaldson - Truman Defeats Dewey
Byron - Selected Letters

... but which will take it upon themselves to start the WAYR thread of the new season?

Here.

think there's a katherine mansfield story based on her stay in war-torn paris and her relationship with carco... i need to reread her stories, it's been a long time.

It's 'An Indiscreet Journey': https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mansfield/katherine/something/chapter14.html -- Didn't know that it was based on her and Carco!

Really enjoyed Mieville's new novella while I sat in the rare sun at the pub today. Don't know hat folks opinions are of him, but it was some of his best writing.

Spring and All 2k16 / what are you reading now?