A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17

Finally reading Pale Fire by Nabokov, loving every minute of it.

Also dipping into Electric Light by Seamus Heaney and Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel.

Jean-Henri Fabre's The Life of the Grasshopper. More sex and sadism than an Ian Fleming novel.

Erwin Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting

I'm enjoying it a lot, but I can't imagine how anyone read it before Google Image Search. The black and white plates are totally inadequate to get a sense of these pieces, and many pieces with extensive discussion aren't even reproduced. What is a reader in 1953 supposed to get out of an unillustrated description of an obscure crucifixion panel? Maybe you're just supposed to know it all already. At least there isn't too much untranslated Latin. Panofsky's a great writer, but this book is very slow-moving and closely reasoned, moreso than anything else I've read of his. He doesn't take any shortcuts, which I don't mind, even if I'm currently in a third chapter on pre-Eyckian book illumination. Jan van Eyck is definitely the protagonist. Everything so far seems to be preparing the stage for him.

Erwin Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting

"― jmm, Sunday, January 8, 2017 3:15 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

I highly recommend this book if you can afford it or find it in a library - my dad has a copy and its easily the nicest art book I've ever seen.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51uBemSstcL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I'm enjoying it a lot, but I can't imagine how anyone read it before Google Image Search.

This was what it was like reading Susan Sontag's 'On Photography'. The times when I was reading it on a bus, away from a computer, were not helpful.

I recently took another break from Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" to read "Wolf in White Van" by John Darnielle. I had a cross-country airplane trip to look forward to, which is usually my best opportunity for sustained, uninterrupted reading time. I read half the book on the way over, and the other half on the way back. I can relate to the narrator's immersion in DIY fantasy world role-playing and text-based adventures. I'm old enough to remember older brothers of friends who played games like ZORK on primitive PCs, though not quite old enough to have played them myself. I never heard of a play-by-mail game - I suspect the author may have invented the concept. It is a good fit for a bookish and (understandably) anti-social character, and it resonates in faintly symbolic ways with the book's other theme of living with the consequences of a violently self-destructive adolescent choice. Although the narrator at one point claims to hate mysteries (contrasting them unfavorably with his favored genres of pulp fantasy and sci-fi) the book reads like a mystery - not a whodunit, but a whydunit. And instead of dropping hints to lead up to the big reveal, the narrator patiently closes off possible explanations. The reader can't help but try to figure out why the narrator did what he did, but the book doesn't really provide much assistance there. Rather it seems to be a sort of quiet celebration of survival, with not thinking about the why perhaps being part of an essential coping mechanism.

Play by mail games definitely existed. I rember all the ads for them in old issues of dragon and white dwarf, and puzzling over who had both the patience and $ to play them.
http://www.tomeoftreasures.com/research_forums/crasimoffsworld.jpg
http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/DFQAAOSwnDZT~5Pi/s-l300.jpg

Those covers go with the scenes, settings, environments in the novel:reduced and reductive, on the face of it, but still with enough detail, muscles in the line drawings etc., you can tell life goes on there somewhere. somehow, and the subsistence level, low-grade fever is easy to relate to when you're a teen (for instance), so let's go inside. Something about the desert just under and between the Southern California green, but also the grassier Midwestern flats in the game and its real life equivalent and the hospital room ceiling and the nickel bags and paperbacks and groping of high school parking lot, the house he still lives in and the front yard and the walk to the store and good talk with two lost stoners of the present day. You nailed a lot more of it, o.nate. John D.'s got a new book out next month.

@TriciaLockwood
remembering a dude I met in Norway who wrote a book about "a race of immortal superheroes whose job it was to make everything more calm"

@TriciaLockwood
when an american writes a calm book it's like Stoner or something & makes people wanna cut their hands off. get with the norwegians on this

Review copies of John D's new book come in specially-made VHS covers, which fits its theme, and I wish I could get hold of one :(

i just read 'In a Grove' by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. i've never seen Rashomon. re-read it a few times trying to puzzle together the opposing accounts, but getting confused about who is wearing a blue kimono ~,~

The film's no clearer 8)

Was also remade set in the West and starred William Shatner and that's worth a look too.

George Eliot - Felix Holt: The Radical

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis (delighted by the unexpected reference to The Man in the High Castle)
Euro Gothic: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema - Jonathan Rigby

Vol. 1 of LoA's Women Crime Writers, discussed in an earlier ILB thread

It's striking how different some of these novels are from their film versions, especially Dorothy R.Hughes' In a Lonely Place, which shares little except its title with the Bogart movie. Vera Caspery's Laura is the best of the novels in this volume and also the most similar to its film adaptation.

I found Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall oddly disturbing, not because of its standard thriller plot, but because of the way the protagonist's dependency/learned helplessness/pretty-little-headedness kept compounding its menace. There are some feminist ideas in the novel, but they are mostly expressed through an image of 1947 female consciousness that felt weirdly archaic. In the (first) film version, The Reckless Moment, Joan Bennett was much tougher and more formidable, and it is better than the book for that reason, but points to Holding for generating suspense with the opposite of the usual clever, resolute heroine.

Read The Blank Wall a couple of years ago - it felt very anticipatory of Patricia Highsmith's work, and also Devil Take the Blue-tail Fly by John Franklin Bardin, so I guess I took the central character's 'learned helplessness' as symptomatic of a certain mental fragility on her part, which of course is conducive to suspense.

read the play 'I never sang for my father' yesterday, p good, reminded me a lot of 'the subject was roses' but w the melodrama a lil more reigned in, I enjoy these mid-60s era dysfunctional/confessional family dramas

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowenstarts with one about a bachelor boarder, who pays extra for home-style comforts, which incl. very close attention by females across the breakfast table; the simple male mind thinks they all want to marry him (well maybe not the venerable Aunt Willoughby, maybe) and senses as much as he is able--in the familiar, always edgey morning drills---the shifting within the pecking order, the political significance of their comments and questions for him, comments and ripostes for each other among them. Just a few pages---he has to eat fast, leave for work---but already, in her late teens or early 20s, she's killing it.
Maybe a little too imagery-happy in the one about the antsy young unmarried teacher who impulsively invites her wary hungry teen girl students to tea, but only at the beginning, which does crank things up for the spring fever spin.
These could be the beginnings of good novels, ditto the one about the vicar and his disconcertingly aspiring benefactor, while "The Confidante" and "Requiescat" could be satisfying endings (could also see all of these as plays). This last is the most complex so far, as a man receives a letter requesting help with "some papers" from the recently widowed wife of someone who was apparently more than a friend. He dreads and feels compelled, by duty and rivalry, to go see her; she apologizes for demoting him---"I tried to play the game." He leads and leaves her to this, then responds in several ways, changing masks and letting them slip a little.

Think all these so far are from her first collection, Encounters, published in 1923 (B. b. 1899).

Did you buy that book or take out of the library?

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis (delighted by the unexpected reference to The Man in the High Castle)

This is a very underrated book, I reckon. It was referenced a lot in the book I just finished, James Gleick's 'Time Travel: A History', which was an enjoyable wander through the literary/cinematic history, philosophy and physics of time travelling.

Kraftwerk Publikation which I just found today in a sale.
Didn't remember having heard about it before at the time but it looks like it covers the full history so I thought I'd grab it.

Still finishing taht Other side of Bob Dylan by Victor Maymudes.

Then was going to go through the memoir of the Flying Nun label head which turned up as 2 for £5 in FOPP over Xmas.

still got 100 or so pages of Ford Maddox ford's March of Literature to finish.
JUst found out taht library has changed policy and you can now get 12 books out at the same time which sounds a bit excessive, so I don't quite get why they went up from 6.

About 1/2 way through Dance of Days on the DC punk scene too. Which was a birthday present from my brother.

I hadn't finished a book in a few months so i read through A Brief History of Portable Literature by Vila-Matas -- 86 pages. It was OK. I didn't know all of the historical figures, and didn't get half of the jokes.

Library book club book this month was a gothic horror novel by a local author. Purple prose (I don't want to see the phrase "Dawn's golden fingers" except in translations of ancient Greek), way too many characters, too much setup. didn't get to page 100.

Now I'm halfway through Candide, another shorty.

I have been crawling and clawing my way past the 1000 page mark of The Man Without Qualities.

atm, Walter and Clarisse keep threatening to do something interesting, but can't seem to get the hang of it. Ulrich has been gabbling a lot to his sister and he seems like an awful sad sack now, whose mind shuffles along and trips itself like a person wearing shoes whose laces have been tied to each other. Everyone is impossibly high-flown and ineffectual. Makes for tough sledding to read about them.

sounds like ilx

fewer zings

"
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowenstarts with one about a bachelor boarder, who pays extra for home-style comforts, which incl. very close attention by females across the breakfast table; the simple male mind thinks they all want to marry him (well maybe not the venerable Aunt Willoughby, maybe) and senses as much as he is able--in the familiar, always edgey morning drills---the shifting within the pecking order, the political significance of their comments and questions for him, comments and ripostes for each other among them. Just a few pages---he has to eat fast, leave for work---but already, in her late teens or early 20s, she's killing it.
Maybe a little too imagery-happy in the one about the antsy young unmarried teacher who impulsively invites her wary hungry teen girl students to tea, but only at the beginning, which does crank things up for the spring fever spin.
These could be the beginnings of good novels, ditto the one about the vicar and his disconcertingly aspiring benefactor, while "The Confidante" and "Requiescat" could be satisfying endings (could also see all of these as plays). This last is the most complex so far, as a man receives a letter requesting help with "some papers" from the recently widowed wife of someone who was apparently more than a friend. He dreads and feels compelled, by duty and rivalry, to go see her; she apologizes for demoting him---"I tried to play the game." He leads and leaves her to this, then responds in several ways, changing masks and letting them slip a little.

― dow, Wednesday, January 11, 2017 6:44 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

Oddly enough I bought the collected stories a few years ago, read all the stories you described here but no more, then sort of forgot about it except for reading a story I saw a reference to somewhere recently. I must go back to them!

Believe Eudora Welty liked every one of the stories. I know the WWII stories are the most famous, such as the ones from Ivy Gripped The Steps

There was a version of the Collected Stories which led with an introduction by Angus Wilson. One with a green, kind of boring cover. Current version in the US with the nice painting lists the Angus Wilson intro in the TOC but it has in fact gone missing.

Mine has an Angus Wilson introduction (boring cover but its navy blue). Were you looking for it? I'm sure I could take some photos and upload it somewhere, its only a few pages long.

Thanks, but I read it recently in a library copy so no need right now. Not sure exactly why its absence irks me. Maybe I am missing the brick and mortar bookstore where I bought his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

Also just remembering that somewhere I have the intro she wrote herself to Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories.

I'm reading the navy blue doorstop edition with Angus Wilson's intro, but you're not missing much without that. Makes a few good points I guess but he's very hats-off to what he beholds as her robust country heiress grace, Conservative but fair-minded (also claims she's better than Woolf etc). But she seems to be full of mischief from the get-go, initially in a way maybe fairly familiar to yer more sophisticated sort of magazine readers, but increasingly pushing against and around gender norms, as female characters, especially (but not only) test power factors and divine secret codicils in their heritage---along with the money and status, always useful, and you can't get away from any of the expectations and possibilities; even if you don't have much yourself, you're downwind of Someone who does. Also, you might be a good little wife secretly lost, re-entering the clutches of the Helper (as she says her friends on the Continent call her), for instance.
Wonder what Woolf, Mansfield, Jane Bowles thought of her? Wonder what DH Lawrence thought, for that matter---prob mixed emotions: here's a "secret" sister, but an suavely uppity woman too.

So far the stories are still pretty short, brief encounters, hit and run. See you soon.

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories -- only a few in, but the first four stories, linked under the book's title, about a Russian spy in the lead-up to and early days of a WW3, are very nice and significantly less pulpy than a lot of the Moorcock I've read.

I like his description in the intro of how his huge volume of 1960s/70s books were "written quickly, but not cynically" (ie Elric in 9 days, apparently)

Finished The Count of Montecristo two days ago. It's hard to imagine that I'll be reading a better book this year.

Now I'm halfway Thomas Olde Heuvelt's HEX, a silly Dutch horror novel about a small village and its very own 300-year old witch.

Blue Boy by Jean Giono; fictionalised autobiog, swelling dripping fecund nature-humans with the real world clearly there but dreamily unacknowledged. Very Giono, in other words. I like it.

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories

is this the new Gollancz collection? (It looks like there was a previous collection w the same title)

God, I read Count of Monte Cristo last summer, Robin Buss translation -- it really is the best thing

Cervantes - Don Quixote. Now onto Part 2, see you next month :-)

did you dudes reading the count of monte cristo do abridged editions or did you go the whole hog?

Philip S. Foner - History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 1: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor

sweet

Sciatica - I read the Robin Buss Penguin translation, which is unabridged and really easy to read, if not to hold.

Not sure how an abridged version could work - even at the length it is, there's very little filler. Even the wet romantic leads get some really good bits, and the off-topic chapters about Italian bandits fun - it never drags. There's no Tolstoy-style "...and now I'm going to do a short essay about love/betrayal/tractors before we get back to the story. It's ALL plot and ridiculousness and jaw-dropping twists. Just got 1200 pages.

God I should proofread before I post but you get the idea.

i should learn to read period since i see you mentioned the edition in your original post

also a little googling shows the abridgements to be pretty severe -- looks like maybe 400 pages total in an old penguin paperback

damn you for getting me excited about another long-ass old-ass book

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories

is this the new Gollancz collection? (It looks like there was a previous collection w the same title)

― Οὖτις, Saturday, 14 January 2017 2:44 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, part of the supposedly definitive huge new moorcock collection they have been doing for the last couple of years. I also got Von Bek and another collection, The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

Spots

It's amazing, be excited! I managed it in 6 weeks, as a very slow reader, which is... not too bad? The only challenge is the length, it's super easy to read. NB Buss version is the way to go - I read a few chapters alongside the original uncredited version, which is beautiful but misses the jokes and the fruitiness.

Spots = autocorrect for xpost

ah yeah I don't bother with a lot of Gollancz stuff. Von Bek books are ok, nothing special. Haven't read the Brothel in Rosenstrasse.

xp

I got the Von Bek because it had an interesting-sounding mitteleuropa thing going on; not sure how that will square with all the Eternal Champion! stuff

I suspect u may just not like him dow. he's pretty divisive. 10th of December p representative. i read him for the lols + for the warm feeling i get that he's a nice cool funny dude

Somewhere I saw Cather quoted to the effect that the Nebraska boy in One of Ours was based on a cousin, whom she didn't like and had as little contact with as possible, but she felt compelled to write about him and his fate---didn't know him very well, trying too hard to fill in the blanks---? I haven't read the book, but from those comments, expected the character to be something like doomed space cadet in "Paul's Case" (re William Carlos Williams' "The pure products of America go crazy").

I'll give him another go - I said "even for me" because I have a high threshold for cutesiness and often like it

Yes I'll give him another go too---anyway, my mixed feelings as reported last month on G
George's own thread:

Most of Tenth of December seemed overwrought and and/or too crafty, also maybe not crafty enough, re pattern recognition---if a hyper and otherwise goofy boychild and an old man with dementia are wandering the same landscape, of course they're eventually going to come into proximity and have A Saunders Moment, very painterly. But did like for instance when the way the Unstable War Vet, the kind that used to be standard on TV etc. before vets pretty much vanished from TV etc, gets re-absorbed into the family dynamic, for a while--and of course might actually freak out etc. later, with family members getting some measure of blame, suspicion etc; Saunders does always seek some kind of verisimilitude, and there he gets it. But overall, I think Karen Russell's Vampires In The Lemon Grove is much better at social commentary x imaginative writing, with no overselling.
I'll prob read some more Saunders----Civilwarland In Bad Decline was pretty good, I take it?

really fascinating nonfic book about film collectors (mostly from the '50s through the '80s), A Thousand Cuts.

Aidan Chambers, Dance On My Grave
Jim Grimsley, Dream Boy
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Raziel Reid, When Everything Feels Like the Movies
Tim Federle, Better Nate Than Ever
Tim Federle, Five, Six, Seven, Nate!
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Oh, how is that Grimsley? Read an excerpt of something, saw him on a panel in New Orleans, with Rick Bragg and Dorothy Allison, via BookTV.org---both glimpses quite a while back, but impressive.

Dream Boy is fairly well regarded in queer lit circles, and I certainly cannot fault his prose (my thesis supervisor described it as "having a kind of haze over it," which'll make sense to anyone who has read it), but I disliked the way in which the main character was defined solely in terms of his (constant) victimhood. The Aidan Chambers book that I listed above is an ideal counterpoint, I think, focusing upon a queer death (not a spoiler; we know who dies from the very beginning) as a means of reflecting upon a life and a relationship, rather than simply a martyr-in-training.

After reading a few of Wm. Carlos Williams's essays as an appetizer, I started reading The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, Samuel Bawlf, because I need to intersperse some non-fic in among the novels to cleanse my palate so to speak. So far, it is rehashing the history of Cabot, Frobisher, the search for the NW passage, the Armada, etc., but this stuff does have a tangential connection to Drake's circumnavigation of the earth and the author is willing to be brief about it, so I forgive him.

My main interest is reading about Drake's exploration of the Oregon and Pacific NW coast, which will probably get big play later in the book, even if most of the details will be deduction and guesswork. Other than Drake, almost no Europeans came within 500 miles of that area for another two centuries.

Raduan Nassar's Ancient Tillage is so good - his speaking out against Brazilian government austerity is also a model in the way a writer conducts himself in public life - although he hasn't been active since this was published in the mid-70s (which is perhaps another example to writers). Mostly made up of a series short, intense chapters where time and space are slowed and you are fully soaked in nature, sex, rebellion and God - written in this modernistic-style prose. Maybe its the power of modernistic prose, that it can partially shade these things in another mode entirely on the page that give it a different sensibility - Nassar feels fully in command of that.

Agustin Fernandez Mallo - Nocilla Experience. This is almost the first piece of fiction I've read that has tried to LOL respond to globalisation. My problem is I'm kinda sniffy about globalisation - I'd rather it fell apart as a conversation first (its always been something that is not really there, really, a cover for horrible policies and a world that is faaling to pieces). The prose is as flat as you like - and actually you wouldn't have it any other way. People/where/what they find themselves in develop as fragments (and their fragments are taken up 20+ pages after, very 'Short Cuts' I suppose). Its the kind of fiction you could run out of town by simply destroying the theory behind it - and the music he likes. Its like a very technocratic way of doing fiction (Mallo is a Physicist, an 'expert' in other words).

Spring thread time?

Done. ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017