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

So, I finished One of Ours. I won't disrespect it as a bad novel, because it isn't. It shows a lot of Cather's usual strengths, but as Alfred put it, it is a bit of a muddle.

It was published in 1922 and must have been written in 1920-21. It's apparent that Cather quickly understood that WWI had radically altered the lives of about two million young American men and it would inevitably alter the course of the USA. But she can't do much in the book with that insight, because it was far too soon to decide what any of this cataclysmic change would lead to. Instead, the first 4/5 of the novel just follows the rather misshapen development and thwarted idealism of a rather sad-sack Nebraska farm boy named Claude. Consequently, the novel seems like a strange hybrid, combining a Nebraska-centric follow-on to the success of My Antonia with her still-nebulous insight about how American lives were about to change direction in some large way due to the war.

This between-two-stools quality may account for another of the weaker aspects of the book, which is a tendency toward hazy romanticism and sentimentality that runs counter to Cather's usual spare verbiage and clarity of observation. The book often stops dead in its tracks to heave in a paragraph of somewhat overwrought "fine writing" about nature. She also indulges in musings about how fine and upstanding young American manhood is, and how idealistic! There's a definite hangover quality in the book from the heavy war propaganda that flooded the USA in 1917-18. I suspect these delicate concessions to popular sentiments that only weaken the book are some of the very qualities that led the Pulitzer committee to select this book.

If you enjoy Cather (as I do), it's worth reading, but there are at least three or four of her other books you should read before this one.

reading lots of short stories this year fsr. Ted Chiang, then George Saunders, now reading Carver Cathedral

I suspect these delicate concessions to popular sentiments that only weaken the book are some of the very qualities that led the Pulitzer committee to select this book.

This is a good observation, whether it's true or not

flops what did you think of the Saunders audiobook? I think I tried a story of his once and it was too cutesy even for me, but I was probably just in a pissy mood

I read 10th of December mostly in a non-pissy mood, but too much (not all) of it was too cutesy indeed, also increasingly predictable and he lifted at least one plot, though not the right one, because it didn't help. Maybe he's better as a novelist? More often it seems like good short story writers can seem overextended as novelists, but some writers need the room.

xps wins-

the most prominently featured voice (about 30% up to the point i stopped) was Nick Offerman and I couldn't deal

imo (speaking as a Huge Saunders fan) he permanently walks the knife-edge of 'too cutesy' and 99% of the time pulls off the tight rope walk to spectacular results. But having offerman read throws it completely off and into twee middlebrow hell. shame as some of the other voices were quite good. and I love the recordings I've heard of Saunders himself reading stories from Tenth of December. having many voices worked with the disjointed format of the book and everything, shame about that one casting call... i will definitely read it tho

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