The Decline and Fall 2016 of gILBert the fILBert: What Are You Reading Now?

a cynicism that bleeds into machismo

yeah the stories are largely about machismo, i think? like a subtler and more conflicted hemingway maybe. sloppy thoughts: there's also a friction between the revolutionary harshness in whose necessity babel/"babel" genuinely believes, and the empathy/revulsion he can't purge. but over the course of the cycle, as it becomes clearer that the polish war might be just another cossack rampage[*] (which implies that he might be just another jew, and a traitor no less) this friction is in a weird, sad way resolved?

thinking of the difference between "my first goose", where the mundane violence babel's squadmates initiate him into (overriding his "creampuff" intellectuallism, which is also his jewishness) blurs into the rhetorical violence of lenin's words (this time enabled by the creampuffery because babel is the only one who can read them); and the one where he argues with the old man in the pawn shop, who recognizes no difference between the revolution and the counterrevolution. babel's character still believes in the revolution of course but the contrast in the latter story (between idealized+real violence) is plainly sad whereas the unity in the former (between same) seems to me full of cloudy dread (even though it is superficially a coming-of-age story w a triumphant ending)

highly recommend the diaries if you have em? same experiences but filtered neither thru politics nor aesthetics. not better or anything just illuminating. the arc from true believer to numb cynic is much clearer, blunter. and once it reaches the latter it's the bleakest thing you've ever read: "soon we will die. man's brutality is indestructible."

also recommend his odessa plays because those are actually fun for a change.

[* this is not really fair, btw, at least not ethnographically. the konarmiia was mostly peasants; most of the cossacks were not reds as they had been a privileged class under the tsars. babel iirc calls all the soldiers "cossacks", even in the diaries, so the word becomes a projected macho unjewish ideal, admired+feared, attractive+repulsive. however "rampage" is definitely fair.]

halfway through murakami's "what i talk about when i talk about running" (readable but really slight, regret spending money on this rather than getting it from the library, feels sort of like if murakami had a livejournal). just started mark landler's "alter egos" (book by NYT reporter on obama/clinton relationship and foreign policy goals, overall excellent, but keep putting it down b/c it's hard to sustain interest in this after a day of reading news articles about the election). kind of in that depressing phase where i really really want to get the books i'm reading over with so i can get on to something else.

oh hey j.d. i'm reading jonathan schell's the time of illusion on some ancient archived recommendation of yours; finding it totally pellucid so thanks. keep reading bits out loud for pleasure.

At some point in his first two years of office, the President had apparently had one of the most irresistible and irreversible experiences the human mind can undergo. He had been struck by a vision of the world that seemed to bring it all together, into a single pattern. He had concluded that a wide array of apparently disparate evils were branches of one large evil...

lovely accidental pre-echo for me here of the line from the shining i'm obsessed w as metaphor for basically any mental breakage or possession: at some point, over the winter...

mostly narratology, genette, cohn, a bit of the first chapters of novels as parallel research, so i did 'portrait of the artist', 'effi briest', 'the magic mountain', 'for whom the bell tolls', 'gil blas', 'manon lescaut', 'jealousy' (robbe-grillet), i dunno, just reading around

hey glad to hear it DLH -- i've never picked up anything else by schell but that book sticks in my mind. can't quite describe the tone, but it feels so different from anything else i've read about politics. reminds me that you recommended a bunch of soviet history books a couple years back and i've been meaning to get around to almost all of them, espec "three who made a revolution" which has been on my desk waiting to get read for months. (the one i did read was sheila fitzpatrick's short-ish history, which was great.)

oh v glad! that fitzpatrick book's still my favorite primer, not great-man-focused like the rest i probably recommended, so a good one to have picked. on the great-man front (great as in groznyi) everyone's since flipped for kotkin's stalin.

I picked up another Simenon from the local library, The Widow. It is interesting enough. He has a keen eye for the telling detail and a firm grip on human psychology. The emotions he explores are generally subtle ones.

Finished Petrarch's Canzoniere - had only read excerpts and not the full cycle before, and the full thing is tough or incomprehensible (depending on your experiences in life). Incredibly single-minded, it seemed aware of its own place in history as the cycle closed with Petrarch's death and contemplation of re-unification with his Madonna

Now finishing a book of free-verse Indian poetry/devotional sayings from around 12th century dedicated to the goddess Siva.

Took a break from Barrington Bayley to read the latest from Domenic Stansberry, The White Devil, which is based on a Renaissance play of the same name based on a true story, all news to me. It was up to his usual high standard of cool, intelligent noir. I need to go back and read the two books of his I haven't read yet.

But I know, he is on that list of writers that are only read by James Redd, at least ILB-wise.

I enjoyed his book for Hard Case Crime, though that is all of his i have read. Enjoyed the original webster white devil play, too, and would love to read a noir redo of it.

The Confession was the HCC one. It won an Edgar, although there was some kind of strange controversy about that. Seems to be out of print, maybe one offer belongs on that one other thread.

i read Kwaidan. unusual ghost stories. sad that it ends on an essay that seems to advocate eugenics.

Started this last night, am half a dozen stories in: https://cdn.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9780141395722.jpg
and there's some astonishing stuff so far, especially Nescio's 'Young Titans' and Ferdinand Bordewijk's 'The Briefcase'.

Sorry, huge fucking image!

Should add that Joost Zwagerman, the editor, put this book together and then committed suicide before its publication.

K(w)Aidan the film is one of my favourites. I think 2 of the 4 parts are taken from the book and another from another story collected by Hearn but in another book and it's visually stunning.

(The method of converting Japanese to English changed sometime between the book and the film and the w is no longer there which is why the film title has the odd brackets in it)

I saw the film a while ago but I don't remember much of it. I should watch it again.

(It mentions the change to the way they Anglicise Japanese in the intro to my copy so that's where I saw that. And all 4 stories are from Hearn collections)

Everything available here - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/368

One Way Out the Allman Brothers Oral History . Pretty fascinating so far but I just got up to Berry Oakley dying so not sure if it will sustain for teh other half of the book.

I hadn't realised that Gov't Mule were directly related to the ABB until I was looking through the discography recommendations at the back of the book. Looks like it's later members' side project.

Groucho and Me by Groucho Marx.
Pretty satisfying read. Not all wisecracks like i had feared when I first started it. Just got as far as Groucho having retired from films after hanging on the ladder at the end of Night In Casablanca for longer than comfortable.
Quite insightful in places while pretty funny throughout.

Robert Remini - Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
Lorrie Moore - Like Life

How'd you like the Moore?

Irvin Yalom's Love Executioner. I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, whatever you call it: case study-driven popular psychology, the literature of recovery, therapy devolved into folk wisdom, voyeurism-as-self-help... Yalom is very human (at least his self-portrayal is) and you can tell he's a novelist of some skill in the way he channels these dramas into universal themes. And as much as I'm cynical, there's wisdom in here, too. I stayed up way too late with it last night.

That should be Love's Executioner, of course.

The prior version was the working title of the demo version of one of The Cult's biggest hits.

<Flails about for an Ian Astbury/wolfchild/Freud gag.>

Dark Back of Time - Javier Marias
Pack my Bag - Henry Green
The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark

Maggie Nelson - The Argonauts. Really good and love the way theory and practice (in her own life) are meshed in together. The balance of theory/life is finely held over a number of pages. The life tends to feel almost fictional, its so grounded in living with books and writing and other people's thoughts. The painful loneliness is there, you'd think it could lead to a simple existence which could just be an endurance test too, but she is agile enough to grab other people by the hands and doesn't walk away when their lives and complications are presented to her.

1/3 of the way through so far and immensely enjoying it.

Gang Leader For a day Sudhir Venkatesh
The Indian born sociologist who first came to widespread notice through the chapter in Freakonomics about how gang members lived at home went onto write a full book on the experience he had in the Chicago Ghetto with the gang the Black Kings.
I just found this in a charity shop yesterday, thought it was the same story I read 5 years back in that shorter form and am finding it pretty fascinating so far.

wonderfully put xyzzz

Yeah, been curious about that

reread we & now reading zamyatin's short stories for what must be the 3rd time.

The Dragon collection? That's good stuff.

Looking online for cover of the old Penguin ed of The Dragon I have http://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780140037852-uk-300.jpg, I came across this weird We cover http://thumbs.ebaystatic.com/images/g/QdAAAOSw~oFXKuWM/s-l225.jpg, which makes it look a bit like a scifi sex comedy.

yep, the penguin as above. first read it quite sometime before finding a copy of we, which after the stories was somewhat underwhelming. decided to revisit after the khlebnikov collection as was wondering if zamyatin was maybe responding to some of khlebnikov's visions of the future (including glass dwellings/flying transportation!) and time/space theories (confusing as they are).

now need to find a copy of zamyatin's satire of england which i didn't know had been translated!

How'd you like the Moore?

― rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko),

I loved it.

now need to find a copy of zamyatin's satire of england which i didn't know had been translated!

I didn't even know this existed!

finishing up the time of illusion. this is the best book i've ever read about... what? the nixon administration? vietnam-era foreign policy? power? hell? idk.

i've never picked up anything else by schell but that book sticks in my mind. can't quite describe the tone, but it feels so different from anything else i've read about politics.

something like nixonland works hard to vividly recreate the feeling of living through the period, but its "thesis", not that this is everything, is pretty basic: the southern strategy created the political world we live in now (obvious); the national mood that accompanied the southern strategy created the culture we live in now (works fine).

schell book on the other hand looks modest -- just one more analysis of the usual documents -- but is audacious. starts as a lucid, dry book of political analysis -- mostly just quotes from speeches -- and step by well-reasoned step passes into metaphysics. by the time you get to the description of nixon at his fanatically stage-managed convention, every applause line and cheer scripted and timed, standing at the center of this three-dimensional projection of mass praise for a projection of a president, unable to actually deliver a speech or a presence worthy of the projection -- The image had eclipsed its object. The script had swallowed up its author. -- you are basically reading a horror story. a horror-comedy tho: at one point the watergate coverup/investigation is described as the spectacle of a man following his own footsteps in circles while taking care never to discover where they lead. and then this paragraph which i am amazed felt earned:

The Nixon men used the language of the theatre--"scenario," "script," "players," "orchestration"--to describe the way they ran the country, but perhaps the most apt analogy would be to the state of dreaming... A waking person confronts a world that is given, but a dreamer confronts a world that is of his own creation. He is the author not only of his own actions but of the world in which he acts. In him are united subject and object. It is he who arranges to be attacked from behind and he who jumps in surprise. The beast that chases after and the "I" who runs away are the products of a single mind. President Nixon, using the great powers of his office, organized his waking life on the same principle... The President was becoming the author of his own environment. He manufactured events and then he "responded" to them. He invented enemies and then he went to war against them. He gave the speeches and then he applauded them. He threw the rocks and then he ducked. He invented crises and then he made "great decisions" to resolve them. As for the rest of us, it became our fate to live for half a decade inside the head of a waking dreamer.

A+ would trip again. made me wonder if the best nixon movie is 2001.

(was also impressed that the psychological analysis is not just of nixon but of cold war thinking, which it portrays nixon's sickness as an expression of even as the early-70s version of cold war thinking becomes an expression of nixon's sickness. so eerie and satisfying.)

(like a well-argued adam curtis. if you can imagine such a thing.)

If we had waited a bit to roll this thread it could have had a whole different title.

I've waded into the dark waters of Caro's fourth LBJ volume, Passage of Power. Thus far, the most interesting pieces are his descriptions of John and Bobby Kennedy, pre-1960 campaign.

Southern Strategy was also taking back the country, via the contingent of Southern Democrats, descendants of those who came to commerical etc turf agreements with Repubs as Renconstruction was halted/rolled back---re Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Some Southern Dem voters (also some Mayor Dailey Democrates and others) were there to be welcomed and nurtured as they fled alliance w post-New Deal Dems after Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights,crossing over in '66 midterms. Yadda yadda Trump as Repubs' Frankenstein monster, this election as slo-mo version of '68 Dem Convention, bad publicity-wise.
Schell quote reminds me of Forbidden Planet(1956), where ideal spectacle generated by the Mercutio figure's rational process is eventually undermined by creatures from his depths (spoiler).

Has anyone read Cortazar's Hopscotch? After four years of postponing, I've decided to give it a go. It's fun and anticipates much of the literary experimentation running through the rest of the 60s/70s. Interestingly contemporaneous with Nabokov's Pale Fire. Both weirder and more fun than I expected so far.

Reads better in Spanish imo. Not that I've ever finished it, mind you.

finishing up the time of illusion. this is the best book i've ever read about... what? the nixon administration? vietnam-era foreign policy? power? hell? idk.

I read it at clemenza's recommendation several years ago and loved it. I appreciate its contemporaneity -- what good reporters knew the Nixon administration was already doing before Pentagon Papers + Watergate that made it risible.

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neill

I appreciate its contemporaneity -- what good reporters knew the Nixon administration was already doing before Pentagon Papers + Watergate that made it risible.

yes -- the realization that you don't actually need much beyond the early-70s public record (tho the book has certainly absorbed the pentagon papers and the early tape disclosures) to make a clear argument that nuclear strategy brought 1) the u.s. to the as-they-say "brink" of dictatorship; and in downright literary analogy 2) richard nixon to the brink of madness

Until [the Watergate investigation] intruded, the President lived in a closed world in which he rarely had any experiences he had not arranged for himself. As in a dream, some of these experiences were pleasant and some were gratifying and some were frightening. What he could not endure were unplanned experiences that came from without, and it was these that his television set brought before his eyes.

Had he remained in power much longer, he would surely have put an end to such disruptions once and for all. Then no unexpected sights would have offended his gaze... His communion with himself would have continued uninterrupted, and the world he saw would have become co-extensive with his thought processes. There would have been only the sound of the programmed enemies and the sound of the surrogates praising him in words of his own devising. And, at the center, a perfect closed circle, in which he talked to his tapes and his tapes talked to him.

I received the over-a-thousand-page second volume of the Pike/Wilkins translation of The Man Without Qualities for Christmas. I started it last night. I will decide about whether or not to read the over-600 page Posthumous Papers section of this volume after I drag myself another 400 pages, across the finish line on page 1130 of the 'official' novel.

(Aimless tilts his head back to gaze at the ceiling and lifts hands, palms upward, in an imploring gesture.)

merry xmas ILB

finished The Last Samurai and started the Rick Perlstein Goldwater book on xmas eve. verrry addictive so far

btw, if anyone has a remarkably clever title for the winter 2017 WAYR thread, ILB will soon be in the market for such a thing and will pay top dollar.

granta are doing a nice series in which writer's write about their favourite book from a given year, lots of links here: https://twitter.com/GrantaMag

which leads me to: should i read ice by anna kavan?

Desmond Morris the Naked Woman since it was on a charity shop shelf last week.
Also started Tom Jones.

xp Goodreads just recommended Ice to me, I'm def curious, though I just started Jerusalem and should probably not have too many other books going for a bit.

imo, the problem with computer-generated recommendations is that they just try to feed you more of whatever you read the most, so that if you follow their suggestions your breadth of reading material will automatically narrow further and further until you are reading nothing but clones of some book you originally enjoyed, minus any sense of discovery. I like to play the field.

i wouldn't read that far into my being intrigued by one computer generated recommendation.

Hooray another Pelevin fan! I just got Empire V for xmas. Haven't started it yet.

i reread ice earlier this year and it was a lot more enjoyable than my first go through. not really comparable to anything else i can think of. also been planning on revisiting eagle's nest, one of her earlier novels which is more in a kafka mode. would love to get hold of her short story collections, the ones i've read are a+ stuff.

Can't scroll up right not, assume you are talking about Anna Kavan, right?

the one and only. would be interested to know if anyone's read any of the pre-ak helen ferguson novels?

Speaking of Tarkovsky and such - I have quite a lot of Russian poetry, but it's all fairly old. Does anyone know anything about newish Russian poetry they'd like to recommend?

Helen DeWitt fans, have you read her second novel, Lightning Rods? I've been curious although hear it's quite different from The Last Samurai.

I did a search upon finishing tLS last week, seemed to have gotten mixed reviews (but also apparently is sort of about statistics? very high chance i will read it)

some discussion beginning here

a kind of simulation but better than the real thing ever was - the Tom McCarthy thread

I would completely recommend Lightning Rods - it's very different but also brilliant - the two together make me think she's just the best. There's a kind of what-was-that-? quality to it… a taste I don't really get anywhere else (my other comments are in that linked thread although they do lead down into incomprehensibility)

and xp on Russian poetry - I enjoyed the selection of new Russian political poets in the previous issue of N+1 (no. 26) - I don't think you can get to it if you're not a subscriber, but ilx mail me and I'll share or, if you want to go hunting, the names are Kirill Medvedev, Galina Rymbu, Elena Kostyleva, Roman Osminkin, Keti Chukhrov.

L.rods is very funny and weird

Any algorithm recommending anna kavan and not harper lee is already ahead of the game imo

Cool, thanks for the link and thoughts on l rods. The posts in the McCarthy thread have definitely further piqued my interest!

lightning rods is very good in a very different way from last samurai. i saw her speak earlier this year and she is, i think, super brilliant.

yeah i thought lightning rods was hilarious, half from the writing itself and half from my ongoing disbelief that someone actually wrote this book. also very angry. she's def brilliant, i'd be kinda terrified to speak to her.

It is happening again: A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17