The Double Dream of Spring 2019: what are we reading?

Finishing up City of Quartz by Mike Davis, starting in on Impatience of the Heart by Stefan Zweig

Reference link to previous Winter 2019 WAYR thread.

I will finish it, but I would rate Gore Vidal's Washington D.C. as easily the worst of his series of American political history novels. It is more sensationalized, less substantial and less grounded in historic fact than any of the subsequently written entries in that series. It was probably worth skipping, but I'm close enough to the end that my 'completist' urge has kicked in and I will see it through.

And you can learn anything you want about James Burden Day from Empire and Hollywood, thus making Washington DC eminently skippable.

JG farrell, "troubles"

The Train, Georges Simenon (originally published as Le Train).

A Hidden Landscape Once a Week
Walter Benjamin: the Story of a Friendship - Gershom Scholem

Dobson's murderous contagion. It's interesting but very dry reading. Interested in more books on medicine/diseases. But after this I want to read sth lighter. Prob more PK Dick. I finished Skull the other week and realized how great his writing is.

I'm ashamed: never read Simenon. It's ab time I did.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

It's ab time I did.

Just remember you are not required to like his books. He has his flaws and limitations, like any author.

Richard Stern's Other Men's Daughters, available in the NYRB edition. I know he's a Writer's Writer, revered by Roth and Bellow, but, boy, is his precision impressing me, especially at the service of the world's least interesting plot.

I must read him.

If you had added one more “Writer’s” in front you would have got me.

Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
Gore Vidal, "The Zenner Trophy"

About 2/3s of the way through the Big Midweek Steve Hanley's memoir of life in The Fall. Quite enjoying it and he is completely scathing about the Smiths maybe all of them.
I can't quite place when I am in the book at the moment I think it's past the point I have at least lps by the band. I do have the Peel session box.

Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi
Book on underlying violence of trade and society etc.

Fighting The Banana Wars
Memoir on Fsitrade history.

Bob Woodward Feat
The Woodward book on the Trump story which I got half way through then started reading something else a few months back.

Started Gravity’s Rainbow. Made it through 80 pages in college, then 300 pages in law school. This time I’m going all the way.

godspeed pbkr, it is totally worth getting through, its most beautiful passages are toward the middle and at the very end

i am still stuck in the last third of the rest is noise but i'm gonna finish it this or next week and start doctor faustus, which will also prob take me three months to read bc thomas mann

Felix Krull surprised me -- it's the nearest equivalent to a beach read he ever wrote

Nearly finished Monte Cristo. I got a little bored of it around the third quarter, but then a couple of twists in the plot brought me back in.

Having finished The Train, I am of two minds about it and it is difficult to explain without describing the entire book. Maybe it would be sufficient to say that the story is set in 'a time taken out of time', where a young ("22 or 23 year old")woman simply appears, attaches herself to the protagonist, has sex with him within hours of their meeting, makes no demands upon him, and after many weeks of liaison she disappears at the proper moment, gratefully absolves him of any further responsibility, and he more or less resumes his prior life.

The mechanism that makes all this ring true is that the story is set at the first weeks of Germany's invasion of France in WWII and the main characters are refugees from the area near the Belgian border, thrown violently out of normal life into chaotic circumstances. Within that framework, the premise is less jarring. But the fact that the plot runs directly along lines of a common male fantasy just kept niggling at me as I read it and I never did feel like Simenon quite managed to put enough complexity into his story to distance it from that simple underlying fantasy world.

Then I had some extra time last night and read Elizabeth Hardwick's critical essay, "Melville in Love". As indicated by Alfred, it was a good one.

<i>Leave It To Psmith</i>. Had no idea Comrade Psmith was a Blandings spin-off; I'd read some Blandings before but this being a novel it still feels really weird to read a Wodehouse that is not in Bertie Wooster's voice,

Psmith started life as a secondary character, a student of Wryken, the public school where Wodehouse set some of his earliest novels, patterned loosely after Tom Brown's School Days. He later moved up in the world.

/It's ab time I did./

Just remember you are not required to like his books. He has his flaws and limitations, like any author.

I like the Maigret books that I've read (not very many) for their undersold invitation to a measure of compassion, or sympathy, in the justice meted out by getting the goods on characters, however they may fare in crime, court, or anywhere else in the System: there's a sense of dry desperation even in success, where legit biz and rackets parallel and merge, not to mention on other rungs, indoors and out on the streets, day and night. Maigret can't ever seem to forget his own origins for long, as s motherless hick who flunked out and started over as a beat cop in the City of Light, hungry all the time, and now, as a celebrity cop with a decent check maybe, he eats a lot (one commentator mentions that his wife feeds him "like a toddler), drinks a lot, smokes a lot, as his best friend the doctor reminds him, though some of it is stress of the job---he's certainly no bleeding heart, but he knows what makes people tick, and he has a conscience.
In Maigret's Failure, a bloated figure from the bad old days in the sticks suddenly materializes, richer than ever and demanding protection--M blames himself for letting personal distaste (the Meat King is a poison madeleine for all kinds of unwelcome memories) interfere with professional judgement. No one else seems to agree---the guy was a notorious ahole, had it comin'---but he knows.

I've been reading the Homeric Hymns in a poetic translation by Jules Cashford.
I must say it is a nice translation, modern enough to be readable while preserving a sense of the archaic. Another plus: no thees and thous.

I also own the Loeb edition of the Hymns, with the Greek text and a prose translation on the facing page, but it's mostly in my library so as to have the Battle of the Mice and Frogs and other odd fragments of Homerica.

there's a sense of dry desperation even in success

There's a really great instance of this in the first Maigret adaptation featuring Jean Gabin - case has been solved, everything's ready for the ending, and Maigret just walks into the Paris rain, grim music letting us know there's nothing to celebrate.

Was wondering about the Gabin connection, since his picture is on a bunch of Maigret audiobooks.

Yeah, he did three Maigret adaptations late into his career.

Not as intuitive a choice for him as Rowan Atkinson of course.

I have kicked off spring with some Jose Saramago. Cain is a re-write of a bundle of old testament tales, some of which (Abraham) worked really well, and recalls Pasolini in his readings - although the abrupt ending hints that he didn't quite know what to do with what he started. Now on another one of his All the Names, which is shaping up to be something else, there is a re-writing of Kafka's bureaucracy going on already and I am definitely here for it!

I am also pacing through Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and nervously laughing. Its quite soemthing picking this one up - the failing upwards hits in a way that it might not have done if I picked this up in the late 90s.

Eugenides, Fresh Complaint

still Jane Eyre, over halfway. Fantasizing about a sequel/fanfiction AU where Jane and Rochester do crimes together

https://www.dclibrary.org/sites/default/files/styles/new_large__480x480_/public/EyreAffair_0.jpg

close enough

I read that ages ago actually! Catching up to the source material. Maybe if I reread it I'll get more of the jokes.

I finished Big Brother by Lionel Shriver. It won me over. The characters get more fleshed out (as they slim down) and she has a few other tricks up her sleeve. I'm now reading Spartacus by Aldo Schiavone. I liked the previous book on Ancient Rome that I read by him, and this one is shaping up to be just as good.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

I have kicked off spring with some Jose Saramago. Cain is a re-write of a bundle of old testament tales, some of which (Abraham) worked really well, and recalls Pasolini in his readings - although the abrupt ending hints that he didn't quite know what to do with what he started.

I remember the hype around that one felt very stale at the time - Saramago pointing out that Christianity is fucked up for the millionth time, the church throwing its usual temper tantrum, rest of the nation went on as usual.

I slogged through "Rotting Hill" by Wyndham Lewis, in which WL conjures a bunch of straw men with whom he can argue or agree, such that he can fulminate against the post-WWII Labour administration and the - apparently - inevitable slide of the UK into total, permanent, Soviet-style state control of everyday life.

This is fundamentally a bad book but the combination of occasional passages of glorious writing plus the weirdness of reading such trenchant political analysis that turned out so wrong made me just interested enough to keep going.

I just finished 'Jane Eyre' which is one of the best books I've ever read.

To celebrate I got 3 books out at the library

Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea

Finished The Big Midweek which was a bit of a downer but has me wanting to be more familiar with teh era of fall I like most. Hadn't really heard Room To Live before. Do love Dragnet and Hex Enduction Hour. Not sure how late I'll go with it now. But that late 70s/early 80s does seem to be pretty peak.

So got Heads by Jesse Jarnow as the book by my bed. Seems to be 1973 and talk is about the birth of theh internet, graffiti and jam bands/living in bushes in Central park.

Started reading Bob Woodward Fear again & I think I'm roughly half way through. Tillerson has just called Trump a moron.

Been listening to Podcasts while i'm moving around town so not been reading on the bus.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

ordered this immediately

Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea

That's quite the trio! Enjoy.

I finished The Lay of the Land the third Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe quartet. Like the previous two, it details the lead up to a US holiday, this time Thanksgiving, and it's, I suppose, a narrative of the epic in the everyday. Bascombe is a one time writer now a realtor, and his worldview is a rational one, at heart, but like the rest of us, he's dealing with the sublimity and enormity of what it means to be human - albeit from an ultimately privileged, middle-class American viewpoint. As a reader, you're left to wonder why he writes (yes, it's a constructed narrative, a trick, of course), and you wonder if it gives his life meaning and vice versa. I've read somewhere that Ford's project is along the lines of 'writing is a report from the real world directed through the craft of fiction' which I need to think about a bit.

I'm now in that trough that comes after finishing a huge novel, and I'm reading bits of Emerson (who is probably Bascombe's closest thing to a guardian angel) and desultorily re-reading Homage to Catalonia for an upcoming trip to Barcelona.

This month's Penelope Fitzgerald is "At Freddies". It's (seemingly) less deep but so far lot funnier than anything else I've read by her (Bookshop, Human Voices, Offshore).

Leave it to Psmith is my favorite Wodehouse. Surprised it hasn't been made into a movie (or maybe it has?). First I read, and the gateway drug to all his other novels. Local 1/2 Price Books stores are sadly slim on Wodehouse novels, aside from a few constants. I keep hoping to luck into an estate sale quantity.

After seeing The Sisters Brothers, catching up on Patrick deWitt's novels. TSB, Undermajordomo Minor, both read & liked. Now 1/2 into French Exit, with Ablutions next.

I read "The Drawer and A Pile Of Bricks" by David Berridge, which is I suppose what they call experimental literature (the tell is the positive quote from Joanna Walsh on the back). I couldn't really work out what was going on, though I think something probably was going on. I found a certain pleasure in reading it, grasping odd bits and patterns, but it was a bit like reading a set of clues for a crossword, clues for which you don't understand the rules and the crossword grid's not there. I wonder if I read it again whether all will become clear? I may never find out.

I'm at loose ends. I read some of Virgil's Eclogues last night and due to their similarity to counting sheep, I fell asleep on the couch.

I still need to check PSmith, but enjoyed Uncle Fred In Sprigtime: the gallant UF is an alarmingly alternative Jeeves to his manor-born/borne relations.

"Uncle Fred Flits By" is the ultimate Wodehouse story for me

I read a Psmith in my adolescence, which I undoubtedly enjoyed but don't recall much of

This is fundamentally a bad book but the combination of occasional passages of glorious writing plus the weirdness of reading such trenchant political analysis that turned out so wrong made me just interested enough to keep going.

(If you want this knackered 1st edition of RH, Fizzles, it’s yours.)

Guy De Maupassant Bel Ami
1885 novel about an ex-m,ilitary social climber in Paris in the late 19th century. 1975 translation which flows nicely.
Quite compelling read, I don't think I've read any of his novels before. I did read some of his short stories a few decades ago and not sure why I haven't gone back to read more.
I was surprised that de Maupassant was as late as he was, maybe the short stories I read were set a lot earlier. i thought he was early 19th century.

I'm still mired in a lack of ambition, so I'm rereading a Mary Renault historical novel, Funeral Games, covering the period immediately following the death of Alexander of Macedon. I first read her stuff back in the 1980s and this was the one I remember as being the least romanticized.

Have you read railroad histories? I hadn't thought to, but suddenly encountered several at the library today. Great subject (and today's Wall Street Journal delved into a massive gathering of the railroad tribes re radically re-making schedules---past the latest relaunch into bits of chaos).

I read a biography of James Hill, founder of the Northern Pacific railway, last year. It was quite interesting, if a bit too mythologizing. It painted Hill as being capable of almost anything, legal or illegal, to win a contest he wanted to win, which seems correct.

The age of railroad expansion in the USA is mostly about high finance, rampant bribery, and low trickery, but also is some of the most revealing history of how laissez faire capitalism works in action. It isn't quite as heroic as Ayn Rand envisioned it.

Henry and Charles Francis Adams' long essay about the Erie is worth disinterring.

Picked up City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davies. This edition from 2006 has a new preface, which is very good. Interesting to read some of the pre-crash observations:

The city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of the groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce. There was no mechanism to redistribute any share of additional city revenues to purposes other than infrastructure or Downtown renewal. There was no 'linkage', in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.

and

In The Valley, a so-called 'slow-growth movement' had suddenly coalesced out of the molecular agitation of hundreds of local homeowners' associations. Although many of the movement's concerns about declining environmental quality, traffic and density were entirely legitimate, 'slow growth' also had ugly racial and ethnic overtones of an Anglo gerontocracy selfishly defending its privileges against the job and housing needs of young Latino and Asian populations.

Of course, these things were known. The GFC didn't suddenly create the failures with which we're grappling of course, it was a consequence and an intensifier of them. But it's striking reading them here on the eve of that crisis.

I'd be interested to know how any LA people here, who have read the book, feel it's aged. or what has changed since its depiction.

I read "Spring" by Ali Smith. I liked it very much and I think the current quartet (of which this is the third) is a very interesting project. She seems to divide opinion though?

I also read " A Close Watch on the Trains" by Bohumil Hrabal, which is a little bastard of a novella sloshing around in the absurdity and brutality of the dying days of WWII, from the point of view of a junior member of staff on a provincial train station as the Germans retreat through Czechoslovakia.

(great film)

Yes, I think I have actually SEEN the film CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS.

On Sunday I finished PROMISED YOU A MIRACLE (Andy Beckett) at last. On balance, it's tremendous and utterly my kind of thing.

Next I will finish the Myles letters at last.

Reasonably happy to have managed to read these books on the side while mostly doing other things.

Richard White - The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
Amy Hempel - Reasons to Live

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

Some writing just isn't well-represented by brief quotes, and every sentence doesn't have to be and shouldn't be suitable for framing (otherwise things can get way over-ripe, like James Salter's lesser work).

What's the Hempel collection like so far? Read a couple of very enthusiastically detailed presentations, but quotes from the stories didn't seem to support the reviewers' takes---seemed more tell than show, and her dramatic pronouncements not that deep---I dunno, will see if the library has it.

― dow, Wednesday, April 10, 2019 7:26 PM (

James Woods' New Yorker review a couple weeks introduced me to her, so I started at the beginning. So far she's Lydia Davis -- terse, almost gnomic -- without the wit.

Magdalene Tulli: Flaw -- strange but beguiling; story seems to be set in a 1930s-ish Central European-ish place, told perhaps by (a) God, and the characters are halfway between real people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

people and actors on a vast set the God has created? I don't know what's going on, tbh, but I like it.

Have you seen marwencol?

Woah, no... BUT I'M GUNNA!

I checked a copy of Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright, out my public library and read about 20 pages last night. He almost lost me right away by citing the plot of The Matrix, especially the goddamn red pill/blue pill scene, as a way of understanding some of the essential message of Buddhism. Fuck that, I thought. But I did read on and may continue it tonight. Past that, I can't say.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism, but rather believes it is nothing more than exotic nonsense. iow, an audience of Dawkins acolytes. Maybe that describes most of his circle of acquaintance, since he describes himself as an evolutionary psychologist, which is a field wholly entwined with sociobiology. I guess for these reasons alone, the book may have a sort of freak appeal as a glimpse into such a mind.

So far he seems to imagine his reader has zero knowledge of or sympathy with Buddhism
I assume, based on your screenname and other evidence, that this is not the case with you.

That is correct.

I'm reading "The Sioux", one of two novels by Irene Handl (at this point USians might want to do some googling)... and it's quite a thing, like a sort of louche campy Ivy Compton-Burnett... maybe? Anyway, talking of googling, I came across a tweet by Matthew Sweet (not that one) asking whether anyone had read it - to which he got a reply from Tanita Tikaram(!) saying she had a signed copy, dedicated to Sir Malcolm Sargent, and a reply from Robin Askwith(!!) who has a copy given to him by Doris Hare (I did advise you to google) signed by Irene Handl and her dog.

Metal Mickey Irene Handl???

The very same.

^^ Whoever invented language is currently doing that rubby hands thing, saying, *finally, they got there*.

Tanita Tikaram was on the Book Shambles blog and was surprisingly interesting and well read.

Reading Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories From The Trailblazers Of Domestic Suspense. Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, some lesser known names.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, April 2, 2019 3:08 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks so much for mentioning this, I tore through like 3/4ths of this over this past weekend and was delighted to learn that the editor followed this up with a box set of novels in the same vein for Library of America which I'm going to have to get now probably.

Thanks so much for mentioning this, I tore through like 3/4ths of this over this past weekend and was delighted to learn that the editor followed this up with a box set of novels in the same vein for Library of America which I'm going to have to get now probably.

You're welcome! Didn't know about the novels, will have to check these out! I'm almost finished and have to say the general level of quality in this anthology seems very high - a few of the stories at the beginning seemed to rely too much on their twists, is the biggest complaint I can muster. I don't read a lot of crime fiction, tbh - it's pretty much just Simenon and Donald Westlake for me.

Picked up Wolfgang Hilbig's The Females, another 100 or so hallucinatory pages depicting a man not in control of anything in his life except what he can put down on the page, and in that the control is absolute. Onto Jose Saramago's All the Names with its accumulation of the tiniest grain of detail over paragraphs that go on for pages. Both books have this plot in the form of a quest for a woman (or a group of women in Hilbig's case), but at some point there is nothing as mundane as plot, writing with little narrative direction, and seemingly more important things to say and talk about, only so much of which can be transmitted.

Its totally my jam.

Report from the middle of Why Buddhism Is True: he is good at simplifying Buddhist thought and putting it into frames that a novice western mind can grasp more readily. On the minus side, he has the maddening habit of assuming that evolutionary psychology ('EP') has the authority of "science", consisting of MRIs, experimental data, and doctors with degrees who form its theories, and therefore when its theories overlap with Buddhist thought, it is "science" that is the ascendant authority, which then validates Buddhism. He also keeps trying to tweak Buddhism so it will better fit evolutionary psychology, as if any deviation from the doctrines of EP represent minor flaws in Buddhism which need correction from or reconciliation with EP.

Buddhism is validated by the personal, living experience of Buddhists, as they live out its precepts. No further validation is asked or needed.

listened to a very good old RTE radio documentary about the last 149 days in the life of JG Farrell, who had moved to West Cork. Starts with an extraordinary eyewitness account of his death. Then explores and interviews the small network of relations (locals, visitors) that existed during that period for Farrell. You get a quite powerful blurred image of the days emerging from those interviews, a sense of the uncertainty at the perception of recollection and how much anyone can be said to be known, and the somewhat uncertain building of a life of isolation.

strongly recommend it if you have time.

the rte strand that it’s taken from, recommended by darragh cos of a chester beatty library episode, is often very good. the one on herring fishing recently springs to mind.

as for reading, been travelling a bit and continuing slowly with city of quartz, which i’m enjoying, and a James M recommendation for a long flight - Ascent by Jed Mercurio. Story of a deadly russian flying ace, fighting covertly in the Korean War and then later at the North Pole. don’t know where it’s going but it’s skilled in depictions of g-force dogfights, the competition of the pilots and the abstracted psychology of the main character.

Peter Smith – An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems
I'm really enjoying working through this. It's quite accessible, and has a nice way of frequently pausing to sketch out the path ahead in increasing detail as more of the groundwork is developed.

Ascent: i said above that i wasn’t sure where it was going because it had just shifted from aerial dogfights in the Korean War to the Arctic and I assumed the clues that the protagonist was on a trajectory to space flight were wrong.

in fact in sum and having now finished it this is a book that turns the notion of the character “arc” into a series of cosmically ascending movements, from the basements of stalingrad to the moon.

a lovely moment late on pictures the story in reverse - falling from the korean sky like a comet or angel to the basements of Stalingrad.

the physical atmospheric conditions of each of these are a substantial part of the matter of the book: the freezing, the role of gravity and g force, liquid and vapour. it’s also a piece of counterfactual or rather invisible history. hidden rather than alternate.

it’s very good, and quite unusual.

just to add to the “invisible history” thing. at no stage is this conjectured fictional character allowed by the politics and administration of his situation, to exist, and in fact it is this that allows him to become achieve a piece of history that didn’t happen.

i’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

tana french's "the witch elm." she is such a good prose stylist.

really looking forward to reading that!

took a break from war & peace to read "at freddies" (which turned out to be my favourite PF so far) and headed straight into "innocence"

Yay, Fizzles, glad you liked Ascent. Hidden history is exactly right. I was so enamoured of that book, and wanted to see what Mercurio did next --and then it turned out to be a very long novel about JFK :(

Which latter was not good.

There was some discussion of Ascent on this thread: DSKY-DSKY Him Sad: Official ILB Thread For The Heroic Age of Manned Spaceflight

Yall had me thinking of James Salter's maiden voyage, The Hunters, and in fact Geoff Dyer makes the same connection here (I read this after some of Salter's more lapidary-to-lush works, and was struck by the tension in flight, all the observations and impressions and input that the pilot and his colleagues have to balance)(the most concise expression of his talents hell yes)
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/03/29/the-hunters
Salter tweaked it later, so the most findable version may or may not be the best.
Then again, a review of the second edition is reassuring:
The revisions made by the author for this new edition seem minimal. A graceful chapter concerning a weekend leave in Tokyo, rendered too rapturously in the original, is toned down and improved. Some passages from Cleve’s letters are reduced here in their ambition, making the protagonist less the budding writer and more an ordinary Joe. (Salter also fought and flew along the Yalu, and the novel is full of autobiographical atmosphere.) Thanks Mark Greif!
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/then-and-now-1999-2/

amos tutola - palm wine drinkard

GREAT BOOK

I read "Chaos and Night" by Henri de Motherlant and I thought it was really very boring indeed.

I thought "Chaos and Night" would be a bit like Celine. I was wrong.

Haha yes I thought something similar.

(I am hoping someone comes on here to rep for "Chaos and Night" and tell me what I've missed.)

I've been reading Colm Toibin's Homage to Barcelona which I'm sort of waiting to take flight and re-reading Javier Marias' Written Lives, which is a series of virtually fictionalised capsule biographies. I say fictionalised as they're so elliptical and carefully chosen that they might as well be fiction (no less powerful - and gossipy - for all that). I'd forgotten how anti-Joyce he is and just how candid the excerpts from the letters to Nora are. Yikes.

I've got Marias' Heart So White lined up next.

Aimless, anyone, what books about Buddhism do you recommend for beginners? Also Tao.

Chinaski, re Written Lives, can I recommend Fleur Jaeggy's THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, if you don't already know it.
https://www.ndbooks.com/book/these-possible-lives/

Don't know it, JM - thanks for the recommend.

In a similar vein, I also really like Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: http://rachelecohen.com/product/

Aimless, anyone, what books about Buddhism do you recommend for beginners? Also Tao.

When people ask me to recommend books for them I get very nervous. This applies universally, not just to Buddhism. I came at buddhism through Zen, via the strong curiosity I acquired after discovering the Tao-Teh-Ching. I have a very poor theoretical grounding and no regular practice, and understand the truth of Buddhist precepts only insofar as I have experienced them. I will say that my long solo wilderness hikes have taught me quite a bit about the workings of my mind and the unmade universe and what I've observed fits very well with both Taoist and Buddhist insights.

As I recall, quite a few books have been mentioned on the Buddhism thread. My advice is peck around at various titles until you find one congenial.

That Rachel Cohen looks really intriguing. Also reminds me of this extremely entertaining book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/30/craig-brown-101-improbable-encounters

That was fun, but hope the Cohen isn't very much like it. Thanks for the link, Aimless, and I'd been thinking of starting with the Tao too.

Ursula K LeGuin’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching is quite wonderful.

I finished Jane Eyre! I like the part where she lies down in a ditch and prays for death.

Family And Kinship In East London, Michael Young and Peter Willmott

I finished THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN.

I then read a quarter, so far, of a 1982 Penguin book called WHAT IS DUNGEONS & DRAGONS?

the age old question!

I finished 'This Book Will Save Your Life' by AM Homes two weeks ago. I don't have this often but I still think of the protagonist daily, kind of wishing him well (even though he -spoiler- prob died at the end). Very witty, funny book, and a tender critique on self-help and the quest for enlightenment/emptiness in today's world.

Just started 'Accordion Crimes' by E. Annie Proulx. Gritty!

I remember WHAT IS DUNGEONS & DRAGONS? fondly, having read it in the 1980s. Having said that, I'm sure it's probably not very good.

I'm midway through Javier Marias' A Heart So White. It's kind of bewildering - partly because of the digressive nature of the narrative and partly because of Marias' Jamesian clause-upon-clause-upon-clause style. The central character is a translator and is seemingly running from an event in the past so the narrative and stylistic choices matter but even so, the centre - that which around the narrative swirls - is obscured.

There's also the looming presence of Macbeth that goes beyond merely the title (it's from A2, S2, when Macbeth runs in with the daggers all flustered [who wouldn't be - you've just shanked the king and are doomed for all eternity] and Lady Macbeth is trying to snap him out of his guilt-ridden reverie: 'my hands are your colour but I shame/to wear a heart so white) and seems to be a commentary on agency and how culpable we are for actions that we're tangentially related or adjacent to - be it regicide, a translation, or some event that occurs before we are even born.

In his capsule biography on James in Written Lives, Marias writes: 'on the whole, he spoke as he wrote, which sometimes led to exasperating extremes... the simplest question addressed to a servant would take a minimum of three minutes to formulate, such was his linguistic punctiliousness and his horror of inexactitude or error.' That could be - with his translator's zeal for exactitude - the narrator of A Heart So White.

WHAT IS D&D? is written by three Etonian teens who, on the back cover photo and in the biographical note, do not make a good impression.

Yet the book is actually written with quite a lot of clarity and precision.

One thing that it generally makes me think is the arbitrariness and excessiveness of randomised decisions in D&D (or most RPGs) - the idea that you need to devise a dice table for any decision - when they also introduce mechanisms to slant the decisions to produce certain outcomes (eg: re character creation) ... which leads me to the conclusion, unthinkable within their terms: Why not just decide yourself what the numbers are going to be, based on your judgment of what's best for the game, rather than outsourcing it to the dice?

This principle needn't go all the way; there is space for both; but there is nonetheless an increasing absurdity in the attempt to formulate random-number-based rules for almost anything that happens. Put more simply, there are too many rules - you really shouldn't need most of them formalised in that way.

The book can be entertaining anyway, in delineating a whole underground temple complex and then narrating the party's adventure in it in fictional form, with D&D rules version of the narrative on the facing page.

Tbf, a number of more modern RPGs did go down that route of creating characters for a morevsatisfying narrative, rather than as random number collections.

Well I would say that any RPG can be adapted that way - I always used to wind up playing D&D with quite minimal reference to numbers. But this is a long time ago. And the problem that I eventually had was not enough players - literally ended up playing one on one, which could be surprisingly enjoyable but was very different from what the creators, or even the authors of WHAT IS D&D?, intended.

I understand the fascination of rulebooks, I still have a box or two of them in a cupboard. I like this stuff as artefacts in themselves, but I rarely found them truly relevant to actually playing the game.

Maybe eventually on this thread I will announce that I am rereading an old PGR rulebook from cover to cover.

I read "Yonnondio: From The Thirties" by Tillie Olsen - fizzes brilliantly with feminist and class anger, set in the Midwest in the 20s. I wouldn't have known anything about this if I hadn't been in the habit of picking up old Virago Modern Classics, so this is another Virago win.

The book has an interesting story: it was started in the thirties when Olsen was a young woman, then abandoned; in the 70s she reassembled it into the present form from various drafts, apparently taking care not to add a single word. The final novel remains unfinished but it's really tremendous.

I love that book

The virago edition I have is a double with tell me a riddle which is also great. Olsen’s book silences looks to be in line with the political statement of leaving yonnondio pointedly unfinished, as it’s all about the material conditions under which books can (or can’t) be written. Need to read it.

btw The incredible austerity of D&D in 1980

First game of thrones book. It's going verrrry slow. Lol

Also ordered Tatum o'Neal's bio.

I finished Schiavone’s Spartacus. Though short, it is dense, as Schiavone subjects each fragment of the historical record to microscopic analysis, combining the often vague and contradictory pieces and re-interpreting them in light of his knowledge of the period to produce his best guess about what actually happened. Now I’m reading Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark.

Almost by accident I'm now (re)reading In My Own Way, Alan Watts.

He seems oblivious to the privilege in which he was raised. He even is convinced his family was of modest means, although he had a succession of nannies, attended an upper crust public school, his family occupied a high social position which allowed them to hobnob with people of great wealth, and from youth onward he fell into connoisseurship of art, food, wine and cigars as naturally as a fish swims in water. He barely understands why everyone does not choose to live as he does.

Finished Family & Kinship In East London. Some of the descriptions reminded me of My Brilliant Friend - the local neighbourhood as its own little world that inhabitants seldom step out of, the resentment towards those who receive too much education.

Han Kang's The Vegetarian now.

HUnger makes Me A Modern Girl Carrie Brownstein
memoir by Sleater-Kinney member. I hadn't know the name derivation for the band before.
& need to go back and listen to several of teh bands she mentions.
At the point I've read to she's moved to Olympia and got the band together with the guitarist of a band she used to be into.
Found this while I was looking for a book I needed to take back to the library. It's been in a pile beside the bed for a while, picked it up in a 2 for £5 sale in FOPP a while back.

coming near the end of Fear by Bob Woodward.
funny coming across trump reciting the Joe tex song about the Snake in the week after the Mueller report landed or partially landed.
Seems like somebody inadvertently warning a public about his own behaviour and still having part of the public supporting him.

nice, loved the veg. really weird and wild and fun (though also sad, i guess)

Was kinda dreading starting it, seemed too harrowing. Some of the italics stuff is indeed hardcore - I skipped over the part with the dog to some extent - but I'm comforted by how much of it is comedy of manners. The husband's complete bafflement at his wife's decision and her quiet, uncompromising resistance is pretty funny.

<i>Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl</i> is a pretty great book. Harrowing animal stuff in that one too :/

I finished Voyage in the Dark, a wonderful gut-punch of a novel. I’m looking forward to reading more Rhys. Next up I’m reading In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes.

I'm midway through Javier Marias' A Heart So White. It's kind of bewildering - partly because of the digressive nature of the narrative and partly because of Marias' Jamesian clause-upon-clause-upon-clause style. The central character is a translator and is seemingly running from an event in the past so the narrative and stylistic choices matter but even so, the centre - that which around the narrative swirls - is obscured.

There's also the looming presence of Macbeth that goes beyond merely the title (it's from A2, S2, when Macbeth runs in with the daggers all flustered [who wouldn't be - you've just shanked the king and are doomed for all eternity] and Lady Macbeth is trying to snap him out of his guilt-ridden reverie: 'my hands are your colour but I shame/to wear a heart so white) and seems to be a commentary on agency and how culpable we are for actions that we're tangentially related or adjacent to - be it regicide, a translation, or some event that occurs before we are even born.

In his capsule biography on James in Written Lives, Marias writes: 'on the whole, he spoke as he wrote, which sometimes led to exasperating extremes... the simplest question addressed to a servant would take a minimum of three minutes to formulate, such was his linguistic punctiliousness and his horror of inexactitude or error.' That could be - with his translator's zeal for exactitude - the narrator of A Heart So White.

― Good cop, Babcock (Chinaski), Thursday, April 18, 2019 2:55 AM (one week ago) Bookmark

i enjoy Marias' style - as you note: the digression, the clauses upon clauses - but it seems to be present in all of his work (I've only read 3 of his books), and i can only deal with it once in a while.

Samuel Johnson - Rasselas
Ezra Furman - Transformer (33 1/3)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Olivia Manning: The Balkan trilogy -- this is brilliant

Sorry, could never get into Marías because of exactly that thing you describe

I read "Kitch - A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon" by Anthony Joseph and I thought it was brilliant. It's a series of little stories and anecdotes concerning Lord Kitchener in the (fictional) voices of people who'd come across him or knew him, never in Kitch's own voice (though you get him speaking, as reported by others) - apart from anything else it's a great way to deal with a tension between genius and 'scenius'.

The Way Of All Flesh by Samuel Butler and a BFI Ealing Revisited book now.

Spoilery thoughts on The Vegetarian:

Wow, that change of perspectives really hit me hard! When the book's voice was the asshole husband I really thought Yeong-hye's behaviour was a form of emancipation, of breaking out of the constrictive mold she had been put in. I still kinda thought that when the perspective changed to In-hye's husband, kinda expecting some magic realism development. Also, since In-hye had so far only been portrayed as another bully pressuring Yeong-hye, I really didn't take the adultery very seriously...and then it switches to In-hye and it's made very clear that, whatever pressures Yeong is under (patriarchal or otherwise), her behaviour is a symptom of the pain she's in, not a response or possible way out of it. Her husband's indifference as poisonous to it as In-hye's husband's fetischization of it (and of course, looong history of artists romanticizing mental illness). I felt suitably chastened, like I'd been complicit in the video artist's bullshit. This last third felt a lot like what I had imagined the whole book would be, just painful and hopeless...not sure I really got it entirely tho, will need a re-read (once I can handle it).

If you like painful and hopeless, try her The White Book (which is very good indeed)

Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

Now that's one heck of a weird book

One of those things I read once in childhood/adolescence that I can only dimly recall the details of and probably didn't particularly get the point of.

I'm still slogging through In My Own Way, but hope to end it soon. It appears that Alan Watts only knew amazing, talented, perceptive, intelligent, artistic and enlightened people -- approximately 1000 of them -- and he gives each one of them a brief advertisement of his deep and undying esteem for them. These one-paragraph love letters account for the bulk of the book and they eventually become indistinguishable.

xp

Yeah, it is a strange one. One of those YA classics I'd never read, but remember seeing frequent reference to over the years. I'm guessing its allegorical weight makes has made it a favoured book to assign high school students; more than once while reading it, I thought of that After School Special with Bruce Davidson as the teacher who turns his students into Nazis (we actually did watch this in class when I was in high school).

TCM is airing the movie (directed by Keith Gordon!) later this month. I made the mistake of reading up on the cast while I was still reading the book, and after seeing that John Glover plays Brother Leon, I found it impossible to read the rest of the novel without Glover's voice in my head whenever that character speaks.

I'm guessing its allegorical weight makes has made it a favoured book to assign high school students

Allegory peaked in the early medieval period. It is rarely written at all these days and even more rarely written well. Who the hell thinks high school students would benefit from wrestling with the intricacies of an outmoded and mostly irrelevant genre? Just convincing them that reading literature in any form has some relevance or purpose in their lives is an uphill battle.

Read The Plains by Gerald Murnane when I had an hour or two to kill in a library last weekend. Sort of mesmerizing and boring at the same time, it kept me turning the pages even though I knew that essentially nothing was going to happen.

Just read this on Wikipedia, what a guy:

In June 2018 Murnane released a spoken word album, Words in Order [9]. The centrepiece is a 1600-word palindrome written by Murnane, which he recites over a minimalist musical score. He also performs works by Thomas Hardy, Dezső Kosztolányi, DEVO and Killdozer.

I know the guy who produced that album!

I've read both of Claudia Rankines two 'American Lyrics', 'Citizen' and 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely'. Both of them are amazing, but the world of 2004 really seems a long way away. Am also currently reading Buddenbrook, first Mann novel after reading Death in Venice many years ago. The portrait of Bendix Grünlich as emotionally abusive is pretty modern. Chilling.

Bought E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime from a charity shop because it was a Penguin Modern Classic and cost 50p. It's wonderful - how historical fiction should be written. Just finished The Book of Daniel, whicih is also great, but I didn't enjoy it as much.

Those are the only two Doctorows I've read, too, and had the same reaction. I loved Ragtime, so jumped straight onto Daniel and it cut my enthusiasm a bit. I have Billy Bathgate round here somewhere, need to get to that.

I loved Billy Bathgate when I was 13, but I haven’t read any Doctorow since.

I struggled a bit with Billy Bathgate at the time - something to do with seeing the bones beneath the skin. But it's grown in my imagination since and there are passages that come to me fairly often. I need to read Ragtime.

There's a film of Ragtime with a very late performance by James Cagney in. Haven't seen it in a couple of decades though.

On to Irene Handl's second novel, "The Gold Tip Pfitzer".

I read "Eileen" by Ottessa Moshfegh; I picked it up because someone was giving it away , though I'd liked (but not loved) "My Year of Rest and Relaxation". I liked (but did not love) Eileen. Like MYOR&R it is strong on the agonies of being a young woman, and strong on how those agonies can bend someone out of shape. I think there might be something technically interesting about how Moshfegh manipulates the speed of events in this one, nothing happens for aaaages and she just, just kept me hanging on, and then things quicken towards an end. I'm not critic enough to be able to tell you how that works, if it works.

I read The Book of Daniel first, which is not recommended. Found the historical elements compellingly presented, being totally unfamiliar with the Rosenbergs, who were presented as three-dimensional, fairly complex, forever crosshatched with teeming ambiguities and spectacular certainties: certainly fair game for good-faith fiction. But the wild 'n' crazy narrator and his hott 'n' maybe crazier sister. also their hapless, 1-d adopters, out the author as wanton maker-upper, which might be justified if he were better at it, but any case, it seemed unfair to the actual offspring, the Meeropol brothers, and to their actual adoptive father, bthe Bronx schoolteacher who had withstood much Antioommunist-attention for writing "Strange Fruit" a while back.
So that put me off, but did skim Ragtime, which seemed like it might be okay, and Billy Bathgate got a long and winding reception in NYRB, might have been his peak, also saw good reviews of Loon Lake, World's Fair gen favorable but with some snickers re "Proustian wannabee."

I'm not critic enough to be able to tell you how that works, if it works.

The fact you noticed puts you halfway there.

I'm reading Rock, Scissors, Paper by Maxim Osipov, short stories recently translated from Russian (mostly published around 2010 originally?). It's good so far, I think? Lots of stoic weariness re: human nature.

I'm guessing this is a fruitless search but does anyone know if there is there a way of buying/getting access to individual Paris Review interviews? They're such a fantastic resource but, beyond buying individual issues (at £30 a pop), or hoping they're in one of the anthologies, I can't see a way to access them.

read Ben Lerner leaving the atocha station then read james m Cain double indemnity now reading sally Rooney conversations with friends

xpost
Some of those art of fiction interviews are on aaaaarg.fail

A book called LOTS OF FUN AT FINNEGANS WAKE -- partly an introduction to FW and partly a very detailed genetic description of how certain passages were composed.

Xpost how does one go about accessing such things?

Dunno about purchase, but some are linked via Twitter and enewsletter, also https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews

Speaking of which, any of yall read Bette Howland---?

Wherever you position Bette Howland’s absence, the vacancy is glaring—she has the kind of large presence on the page that reconfigures the literary history of its moment, as, for instance, the revival of Jean Rhys did in the sixties. Both were mentored by an A-list great male novelist—Jean Rhys by Ford Madox Ford; Bette by Saul Bellow, whom she met at a writers conference on Staten Island in the early sixties. Like Rhys and FMF, Bette and Bellow were “lovers for a time.” He continued as her friend until the end of his life, giving her advice that’s solid gold for a blocked, often depressed writer lacking in self-confidence: “I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.” Mercy!
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/06/a-space-for-bette-howland/

Now reading The Friend of Madame Maigret, Simenon. It delivers exactly what I expect a Maigret novel to deliver, thank goodness. It matches my speed atm.

I finished In a Lonely Place. It was a fun, tightly-plotted noir thriller with gobs of post-war LA atmosphere and unusual psychological delicacy. The use of third person limited perspective to get inside the mind of a killer reminded me of The Man Who Watched Trains Go By and was used just as effectively here. Now I'm reading Netherland by Joseph O'Neill.

xpost - for the books on aaaaarg.fail I think I just asked for a login and got one.

I loved In a Lonely Place but read it wrong. Having remembered the movie and assuming the movie to be along the same lines, I kept anticipating the narrator to (spoiler) not be the murderer! Which obviously you're not meant to think at all.

doctor faustus!!!

I haven’t seen the movie so I didn’t have any preconceptions going in. It seemed pretty clear from the first chapter that the character whose thoughts we’re privy to is a killer. xp

LOVED the movie when I first saw it. Dunno how I'd feel about it on a rewatch, abusive relationships and toxic masculinity taking up more space in my brane now. I mean Nicholas Ray's thing was always to express compassion for the outcast, perhaps regardless of the reasons for said casting out, but...

The Chateau, by William Maxwell. Semi-autobiographical novel about a youngish, well-heeled, cultured American couple who spend a long vacation in Europe in the immediate aftermath of WW2. Almost entirely set in France, either in Paris or at the chateau of the title. Not really a character study (the couple are rather colourless though not unsympathetic); rather a meditation on the difficulties of engaging with a different culture and trying to see beneath the surface of people known briefly, when each meeting causes assumptions previously made to be significantly revised. Beautifully written, not without the occasional longeur, but very enjoyable overall. I will read more Maxwell.

A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout (re-read). This doesn't have the kind of literary flair that might make it interesting to a reader with no interest in the subject but otherwise it seems to me a model biography of a famous musician, serious without being heavy, properly researched, very clearly written, fair. Teachout is equipped to discuss the technicalities of the music but doesn't make life tough for the general reader.

Teachout never doubts that Ellington is a significant composer but the portrait he paints of the man is often unattractive. Handsome, charming, capable of generosity but also self-regarding, a serial liar and a compulsive womaniser who treated the women in his life very badly. He routinely ripped off the musicians who worked for him. I've long been used to the idea that many of my musical heroes were unpleasant people, and Duke is very far from the worst, but still.

Major Dudes, A Steely Dan Companion ed Barney Hoskins. I was somewhat misled by the title: this is a disappointing recycling of rock journalism (by various hands) and old interviews. I must have read a fair proportion of this stuff when it was originally published, but that somehow didn't prepare me for how poor a lot of it was. I'd say for diehard fans only, but diehard fans won't find much new here.

Currently reading Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows and Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Weird.

Loved The Chateau, must give it another go sometime.

I read "Built on Sand" by Paul Scraton, as part of my preparation for a forthcoming visit to Berlin. It's a melancholy number about living in Berlin but (more) about how life and circumstances bring people together and tear people apart and I thought it was very good indeed. He must have been tempted to call it "Goodbye to Berlin".

I also read "The Owl Service" by Alan Garner, which I imagine you will know all about if you're at all interested but it's a very good folkhorror / old wyrd Wales thing. For children, kinda.

LOVED the movie when I first saw it. Dunno how I'd feel about it on a rewatch, abusive relationships and toxic masculinity taking up more space in my brane now. I mean Nicholas Ray's thing was always to express compassion for the outcast, perhaps regardless of the reasons for said casting out, but...

I'd firmly argue that In a Lonely Place (the film) is *about* toxic masculinity, not an example of it.

I was pretty surprised after reading the book and not knowing anything about the movie to see that Bogart was cast in the Dix Steele role when I looked it up on IMDB. I kind of assumed he would be the Nicolai character. I guess that makes sense if the movie is more sympathetic to Dix than the book is. In the book he starts out creepy and becomes increasingly pathetic and loathsome.

Dix is a shit in the movie.

I'd firmly argue that In a Lonely Place (the film) is *about* toxic masculinity, not an example of it.

I think...it's complicated. The film portrays Dix as his own worst enemy at various times, in a way that I'd agree isn't far from toxic masculinity, but it's also accepted that much of the way he behaves is, if not Society's Fault (as it would be in some of Ray's more didactic works), at least partly a consequence of being a misunderstood sensitive artist in shitty, greedy ol' Hollywood. And it's fine to look for causes and how for how society molds people - I wouldn't want the film to have no empathy for Dix, or to just wag its finger at him. But it still seems to me like it's...kinda laying a lot of the blame at Laurel's feet, for not being sufficiently supportive and trusting and not being able to see the pain behind the angry exterior enough. Which, when I look back at Dix's pattern of behaviour, I really don't think should be demanded of her. It's very possible tho that the lens I was watching it through back in the day was a bit too enamoured of Bogart's character, perhaps the film is tougher on him than I remember/less tough on her than I remember. Will have to revisit sometime.

I also read "The Owl Service" by Alan Garner, which I imagine you will know all about if you're at all interested but it's a very good folkhorror / old wyrd Wales thing. For children, kinda.

― Tim, Thursday, 9 May 2019 12:34 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read this recently! More notable even than the wyrd stuff was the monstrosity of the moneyed English family, conveyed subtly at first but then increasingly foul an antagonist. You don't always get this kind of social commentary in kids' books and certainly rarely done this well

Picked up The Finishing School, Muriel Spark.

It's a long time since I saw "In a Lonely Place". But not knowing the book I remember watching it assuming that there was going to be a reveal that exculpated Dix, who after all was Bogart: and although Bogie had played nasty a few times, you were still primed for him to be the (flawed) hero. And the reveal doesn't come, and at some point you realise you're watching a different movie than the one you thought you were watching. And certainly as I recollect it, I felt the movie was very deliberately playing with the audience's expectations about Bogart.

I wouldn't want the film to have no empathy for Dix, or to just wag its finger at him. But it still seems to me like it's...kinda laying a lot of the blame at Laurel's feet, for not being sufficiently supportive and trusting and not being able to see the pain behind the angry exterior enough

I saw it for the third time last year, and while the script goes this way, Ray's choice of framing and Gloria Grahame's performance mitigate any sense of blame.

It sounds like the script is a different beast from the book.

frankiemachine, I agree the movie plays with our perception of Bogey, but...impossible to discuss this w/o spoilers but in the end the movie does come down on one side.

Meanwhile, I'm halfway through The Way Of All Flesh. E.M. Forster was an admirer, and it shows a lot - the anger at British middle class behaviour, university as a place of escape and bliss, there's even hints of homoeroticism in the main character's friendships. Butler's no Forster stylistically tho - it's very stodgy and 19th century in the way it's written. Not a diss mind, every now and then I enjoy having something that's like "yeah this huge paragraph is just going to be about one small development, what's your hurry anyway?".

On The Owl Service

I read this recently! More notable even than the wyrd stuff was the monstrosity of the moneyed English family, conveyed subtly at first but then increasingly foul an antagonist. You don't always get this kind of social commentary in kids' books and certainly rarely done this well

― imago, Thursday, 9 May 2019 16:25 (yesterday)

I am not sure I go along with that reading - I mean, you're right, the English lot are incredibly rude and disrespectful to the Welsh, and you're right it's well done but just when I thought it was going to pay off with a straight kind of city intellectuals are divorced from the folk-boldied blood of the land and are but rootless fools business, Huw and Gwyn and Gwyn's mum are all just stuck in this valley and failing to talk / listen to each other properly, and a result just killing each other over and over again, "she's coming back and it's owls" say the villagers, gossiping and monstrous in their own way. It's the English lad (Roger) who breaks the whole stupid cycle by just listening to / behaving reasonably towards Alison!

of course! the dual pull on every character is where the drama lies, and roger does come good, it's a nice little redemptive arc. and the bull-headed powerlessness of the locals is another antagonist, and drives their drama - but i really was struck by the casual brutality of the english characters, clive especially, and the strident total absence of the mother

Very under the radar, even by his usual standards, a new Oliver Harris thriller - a spy novel this time, called "A Shadow Intelligence". It's a bit Belsey Does MI6, but very good so far.

Also working my way through Red Shift and Shadow of the Torturer.

Had no idea re new Oliver Harris, will be getting that.

Please submit info re under-the-radar Oliver Harris.

^Seconded. The name vaguely rings a bell but that's about it.

Halfway through, it’s very exciting. A few tweaks here and there and it could have a Belsey book. It’s got a similar contrapuntal setup - the shady but well-meaning investigator, reluctantly forced to solve a case in order to escape from a larger bit of trouble that he’s caused himself. But so far it’s a lot tighter than House of Fame, which was typically well-written but the plot was all over the place. And none of his books have really nutted the endings - hopefully this one will!

(And it’s a MI6 novel in Kazakhstan rather than a cop thriller in Hampstead this time. But there’s the same finesse and fun in describing weird zones of suburbia and eurotrash tat)

More broadly, Oliver Harris is a William Burroughs scholar who wrote 3 earlier books about a skilled police officer called Nick Belsey who is also unfortunately startlingly bent and suffering from massive impulse control problems. In the first book, The Hollow Man, he is bankrupt and homeless, so decides to secretly take up residence in the house of a missing Russian oligarch. The second book, Deep Shelter, is especially recommended -- it's also a deep dive into the hidden nuclear shelter infrastructure under London.

Interesting. Haven’t read any Burroughs in yearsdecades, but have really been enjoying this audio book I took out of the library of Naked Lunch read by Mark Bramhall.

Keep buying books even though I'm still reading GoThrones.

I'm reading Tom Drury's Hunts in Dreams, the second of his Grouse County trilogy. Drury is a joy to read and ostensibly a soft touch but he manages to smuggle meaning through and the cumulative effect of his storytelling is kinda devastating.

Also reading Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks wherein he produces a 'counter-desecration handbook', gathering lost language for the landscape in the hope of re-enchanting the world. I loved the Wild Places so much but it's been diminishing returns since. I find him so damn earnest at times I have to look away. Small doses.

Agree about Macfarlane. The Old Ways was too much about other writers, and it sounds as if his new one is similar. I loved The Wild Places.

Drury is wonderful.

Finishing Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book that can hardly be believed at times. A pile-on of hallucination, paranoia, sheer darkness to near (and the near is key here, it plays with the edges of) incoherence. I loved how the search and loss (and the transition of one to the other) of faith and meaning is realised by the people in it, to such an extent you feel there are no characters. Its rare to see matter really come out of the page like this, take a life of its own, the page impose its will on you like this. Although I've read a ton of things published after the 1870s that clearly go for this approach to life-on-the-page its really impressive how Dosto is able to leave a mark (or scars). I've read and stopped and re-started a couple of his books, The Devils I finished but that didn't quite hit, so I ended up feeling my time was past, that maybe he really works on the young and more impressionable, that I could go to others after him and get what he gave them - but that isn't true at all.

The worst of all is that its just fucking funny as well.

I am also reading The Psalms now, it just seemed appropriate from what was lying around.

I just started reading Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein. I enjoyed his Nixon and Reagan books, but this one seems to be early enough in the process that he hadn't quite found his approach. It begins with a fairly bogus recitation of grievances against FDR and the unions, from the point of view of an imagined conservative factory owner, but it is the usual self-serving bullshit the owning class likes to tell itself. I was not impressed. From there he segues into some background on Goldwater and his family which is far more informative.

"frankiemachine, I agree the movie plays with our perception of Bogey, but...impossible to discuss this w/o spoilers but in the end the movie does come down on one side."

I'm obviously reading this movie differently from other posters but for me its not about whether or not Dix is a decent guy. His moral character is a premise, not the conclusion.

It's a cliche to talk about Ray's European sensibility and the movie was immediately pegged as existentialist, being compared with Camus et al.

Dix is (admittedly in a slightly watered down Hollywood version) your standard outsider. Being morally repellent is in the character's job description.

Augusto Boal Theatre of the oppressed
Brazilian radical theatre theorist. Ties in with a course i did recently.

Ugly Things #50
another interesting edition of long running psych/garage/punk etc magazine. Pretty much a must read I think.

Albert Camus - The First Man
Julian Jackson - France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944

is that Vichy book worth checking out?

Yeah, it's good. I read it in an undergrad class on Vichy France where it was the main text.

excellent, thanks. I get the perception (possibly slightly misplaced) that Petain was probably as big an antisemitic cunt as Hitler. And he had enough autonomy to not make the statute of jews even worse than the nurembourg laws equivalents and he didn't need to deport Jews as freely as he did, but will have to check that book out.

I don't think outsider means morally repellent to Ray, really. Most often (Rebel Without A Cause, They Live By Night) it means unfairly maligned and misunderstood.

I also think the movie pulls our heartstrings for Dix in a way that say Camus never would.

Current reads:

http://i.imgur.com/GDShD3E.jpg

And he had enough autonomy to not make the statute of jews even worse than the nurembourg laws equivalents and he didn't need to deport Jews as freely as he did, but will have to check that book out.

Yeah. Jackson's book makes clear that Vichy enthusiastically cooperated in meeting quotas.

Where should I start with Parker Tyler? Would want a full tome to be as pertinent as all y'all's comments on In A Lonely Place (given that level, no prob with stoned campy deep dishin' stylistic proclivities of the anthologized PT pieces I've occasionally dined put on).

Underground Cinema?

CinemaFilm

Halfway through the final book of Olivia Manning's FORTUNES OF WAR series, and am going to be bereft soon

I finished O'Neill's Neverland. It was better than I was expecting - quite good actually. It reminded me a bit of Light Years, both in the paean to domesticity aspect and in the dissolution of a marriage aspect. Both did that thing where the woman is withdrawing from the marriage and the man is unhappy about it but oddly passive. Almost like a nightmare in which something terrible is happening, slowly and inevitably, and you can't open your mouth to scream or even protest. I guess some breakups are like that, though the depiction seems to be missing some ingredient: conflict, anger, resentment, or passion. I guess those feelings are there, but curiously muted. Anyway, it does have a cumulative emotional force that I'm underselling here.

Speaking of Salter, and perhaps inspired by the thematic connection, I'm now reading All That Is.

*Netherland, it's late here.

"I don't think outsider means morally repellent to Ray, really. Most often (Rebel Without A Cause, They Live By Night) it means unfairly maligned and misunderstood.

I also think the movie pulls our heartstrings for Dix in a way that say Camus never would."

Daniel I've obviously expressed myself badly.

I'm not talking about Ray's attitude to outsiders in the general meaning of the word.

I'm thinking specifically about the Outsider in existentialist literature. The term probably comes from Colin Wilson's book but it seems to have become accepted as useful shorthand when discussing this stuff.

The outsider has, in some senses, to be repellent: it's not enough that his bad behaviour be anodyne, or defensible, or in a noble cause. More traditional fiction covers those cases.

Dix is full of rage, with a history of violence against women. His response to the murder of a young woman is callous indifference. As Alfred says, he's a shit.

But repulsion doesn't preclude sympathy or nobility. The existentialist hero/antihero is always ambivalent. Dix's refusal to control his rage, or to pretend to sympathies he doesn't feel are signs of alienation but also of authenticity.

The reason I don't think the film is "about" Dix's moral character is that there's no possibility of salvation for him in moral improvement, in treating woman better, being a nicer guy. In existentialist terms that would be a retreat into bad faith, a refusal to be free. He can achieve salvation only through transcendence: transcendence he glimpses through Laurel (I lived a few weeks while she loved me) but which can't be sustained because the authentic Dix is too toxic for Laurel and a tamed Dix would not be free.

There's an argument that all this is adolescent nonsense and that all the film's existentialism does is provide a rationale for glamourising obnoxious behaviour. And yet, most of the power of the movie seems to derive from the way the philosophical element turns it into something much stranger than one in which a damaged man is shown to be too much of a bully to get a girlfriend.

Elizabeth Anderson - Private Government

Pictish progress: New studies on northern Britain in the Middle Ages edited by Stephen T. Driscoll, Jane Geddes, and Mark A. Hall.

Where should I start with Parker Tyler?

I would go for Magic and Myth of the Movies - nice piece about it here:

https://queermodernisms.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/magic-and-myth-of-the-movies-parker-tyler-cover-1/

Thanks Ward and James, will prob try inter-library loan for these, and maybe more PT.

My spring reading has been decent

https://i.imgur.com/7wKlwDm.jpg

Cover seduced me and it didn’t disappoint, sexy and surprising - has that Lanark thing where a lot of the most impactful stuff comes from the Bildungsroman rather than the postmodern fantasy (the two novels are not at all similar before someone says READ ANOTHER BOOK). I mean there’s a particular thing in here that is straight out of YA urban fantasy but what hits is the evocation of various queer scenes of the early 90s, and Paul is a wonderful character, protean, pretentious, cocky, insecure

Daisy Johnson, everything under: ehhh. I liked fen enough that I wanted to see the next thing but there’s something a bit missing here for me. If you wanted to be unkind you could parody her pretty easily, madlibbing different combos of language—bodies—wild places and things. Story is well told tho, I’ll keep checking her out

Listened to don Winslow’s the force, you get inside the head of a corrupt racist pig - it’s read by wire actor Dion graham and he has a quirk where he leaves such a large gap between a piece of dialogue and eg “Malone said” that you’d think there was a full stop instead of a comma between them

Currently taking my time with Joanna Walsh break.up and could not admire it/her more. I’d never have made the Lydia Davis comparisons that are all over the jacket but I can see it, she has a funny way of seeing things and a wryness that gives way to a disarming frankness. Dunno if it’s me being basic but I’m surprised none of the blurbs bring up the Maggie Nelson of bluets and the Argonauts, wrt the essayistic nature, quotations in the marginalia, passages addressed to a “you” &c (the addressee in this seems to be even more of a fuckboy than the “you” of bluets)

So Long See you Tomorrow, by William Maxwell, wonderful and odd, although wish I’d read it ten years ago so it didn’t make me think of a true crime podcast.

An Image Of Africa and The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe, from a Penguin Great Ideas collection.

just finished The Count Of Monte Cristo (vol 1 great, vols 2 & 3 so so, vol 4 & 5 better)

The Tempest, only my third Shakespeare after macbeth and R&J.

next up, Hag-Seed, Atwood's retelling of The Tempest

Washington Square is breaking through my Henry James resistance, maybe due to the pace of the plot and perfect control. I definitely see the Austen comparisons.

that novel has one of the most beautifully calibrated uses of irony (i.e. every scene with Dr. Sloper).

Clarice Lispector - The Foreign Legion

these stories are insane, her narrators dive into intense metaphysical subjective ruminations at the slightest provocation. one is about getting invited to saturday lunch by someone you don’t actually like that much and ends

“I ate without any longing whatsoever. I was wholly deserving of that food. For I cannot always be my brothers’ keeper, just as I can no longer be my own keeper, for I have ceased to love myself. Nor do I wish to form life because existence already exists. It exists like some territory where we all advance. Without a single word of love. Without a word. But your pleasure comprehends mind. We are strong and we eat. For bread is love among strangers.”

man bread is love among strangers

That's the trick to making friends, you bring bread along.

In my queue is my luckiest 2nd hand purchase from a month ago, a 600pp collection of lispector’s “crônicas” called discovering the world. Have only flipped through so far but looks fucking great, I’ve wanted to explore more of her stuff since reading hour of the star and the two Elizabeth Bishop-translated stories and had no idea there was anything this massive to dive into

yeah this collection (the foreign legion) is half cronicas, havent gotten to em yet. i also have the massive and beautiful new directions short story collection but it was too unwieldy so i bought this slim volume used

In the last week read Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss, have since recommended it to at least three friends whose wheelhouse it is exactly in. Short novel narrated by a teenage girl whose loathsome father is helping lead an experimental class that involves living like Iron Age people and exploring the bogs. Sacrifice comes up a lot. Tense and spooky and emotionally involving without feeling manipulative, I maybe wanted a little more from it once it was over but overall was very impressed. Apparently her writing strategy involves completing a first draft, deleting it, and starting over.

Also read The Sovereign by Andrew Elias Colarusso, a somewhat jumbled Dalkey Archive novel about combatants in a future revolution in Puerto Rico. It flashes back and forward in time, throws in a little anonspeak, Twitter messages between the characters of The Quiet American, explicit lesbian sex, and an opening chapter on cordyceps. It’s not as annoying as I probably make it sound, a lot of the set-pieces are very well done, but it feels a bit like a bag-of-tricks novel that could have been something great if its ambitions were a little more focused. I wonder if the author read Clark Gifford’s Body.

Percy's The Last Gentleman at last -- a hundred pages read by the pool this afternoon!

Reflections in the Library -- collection of literary essays by Antal Szerb, full of great insights and perceptive readings of the lives and works of various English-language writers

Percy's /The Last Gentleman/ at last -- a hundred pages read by the pool this afternoon!

Before the Storm has been lagging for me. The major thrust of the book is that the big upsurge in modern Republican-style conservatism rode into town as a result of the massive political realignment caused by the civil rights movement, as racists migrated en masse from the Democrats and blacks migrated en masse from "the party of Lincoln". This is no secret. The sixties capsized US politics, mainly around these issues.

The bulk of the details that are related in the book are about the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts organizing behind the scenes done by conservative political operatives, who were all there to push an agenda of laissez faire capitalism with a big dose of added anti-communism. The stampede of white racists and quasi-racists onto their bandwagon seems to have been welcomed by them with open arms, but only as a way to get votes and win power to push through their income-tax-abolition & business deregulation agenda.

The only sense in which all this is a 'hidden' part of recent history is the depth of detail Perlstein digs into about the political operatives and organizers who ran things behind the scenes. These kinds of operatives have been around since the nineteenth century and have always played a huge, but occult, role in US politics.

The only surprise in the first half of the book is how reluctant Goldwater was to run.

admittedly i didn’t know a tonne about us politics in the 50s and 60s when i read it but i found that book a blast. bit hard to keep up with names, and the convention confused the hell out of me.

When I was a kid and my family drove out to rural areas on camping trips, we'd see big "Impeach Earl Warren" signs by the rural highways.

The Year Of Reading Dangerously, Andy Miller

How was it?

I read "Berg" by Ann Quin, which is maybe as romp-y as grim mid-century English experimentalism got, along with Christy Malry, I guess. Definitely more fun than Three, but I think Three hit me harder. Whatever, a real goodie that I've been meaning to read for years.

I read "The Mussel Feast" by Birgit Vanderbeke, a novella where not very much happens but still a good, sad family story anyway.

I want to an event in a bookshop recently meant to publicise the recent re-rublication of Berg. In the pub after wards, someone I didn't know asked me whether I'd read much Quin.

"I've only read 'Three'... oh and the recent fragments thing that came out"

She gave me a very strange look, like I was being super-pompous, unusually pompous even for me, and I realised that she thought I was saying that I'd 'only' read three of Quin's four novels, oh and a book of collected bits and bobs.

We laughed and laughed.

Of potential interests to NYC readers; free copies of books available in person at Bryant Park's Reading Room -

Classics BookClub Schedule - all events on Tuesday at 12:30pm

June 4: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Hosted by Kayleen Schaefer, Text Me When You Get Home

June 18: The Gallic War by Julius Caesar
Hosted by Barry Strauss, Ten Caesars

July 2: On Murder by Thomas De Quincey
Hosted by Abbigail N. Rosewood, If I Had Two Lives

July 16: Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Hosted by H. S. Cross, Grievous

July 30: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Hosted by James Mustich, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List

August 13: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Hosted by J. A. Dauber, Mayhem and Madness

https://bryantpark.org/programs/bookclub

Oh man, Washington Square has one of the best final sentences ever. Perfect coda section.

Love Walker Percy. That's a great read.

Just read Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys. Found it entertaining in a Max Barry (new book 2020!) way. Good twists, some guessed, some not. Now reading Ruff's Lovecraft County, which, 40 pages in, is setting itself up enjoyably.

Oh man, Washington Square has one of the best final sentences ever. Perfect coda section.

― jmm,

"...for life, as it were"

Alpaca, have you read Ruff's The Mirage? A really clever, audacious and underrated book.

finally completed melville's mardi: & a voyage thither after one failed attempt and various interruptions along the way, so now moby-dick; or, the whale

read lispector's the foreign legion a couple of months back and loved it yet didn't think to check if there was a fuller set of cronicas published... looks like the carcanet edition is more extensive than the new directions (and ridiculously expensive!)

Moby-Dick’s good especially if you like Shakespearean pastiche and long descriptions of whale butchery.

I finished Milkman, Anna Burns, which had something in the vein of a happy ending

I'm reading Richard Lloyd-Parry's Ghosts of the Tsunami. It's probably a bit glib to say it's a tough read, but there it is.

I love Quin. It forms part of a vague 'seedy British underbelly' canon in my mind: Crash, The Lowlife, Chris Petit's Robinson, David Seabrook's All the Devils Are Here, Young Adam. There must be a ton more but my brain's not working this morning.

This week's library haul:

Charles Dickens – Bleak House
Vladimir Nabokov – Pnin
Flann O'Brien – At Swim Two Birds

My favourite book from my the last trip was 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie'

Yeah The setting of Berg made me think of that Julian McLaren-Ross novel “Of Love and Hunger”. I know what you mean about a strain of seediness, some sort of tension deriving from people becoming gradually unmoored from some sort of self-image of respectability. Or something.

Never got what people love about Lispector. Feels a bit livejournal to me.

How was it?

70 pages in and I'm loving it! Very incisive on the foibles of being a reader (thinking you're a fan of someone you've never actually read, buying books mistaking this for being cultured - "I had mixed up art and shopping"; these are clichés but he has enough empathy to lead you to how they arise), quite good on the books themselves, often very funny. There is something a bit matey about it that could turn off an ILX crowd, I suppose - the Daily Torygraph blurb of "High Fidelity for book geeks" is unfair (Miller is miles away from the petulant baby in Hornsby's book), but not super out of the blue.

Finished Mrs Osmond by John Banville, his sequel to The Portrait of a Lady. At the sentence level his mimicry of James is near perfect, as with the original the story is largely driven by a great deal of introspection (though he doesn't reach the giddy heights of chapter 42 of the original); unfortunately there's very little narrative tension, no sense of slowly approaching doom, no turn of the screw, no hammer blow in the last page.

Alpaca, have you read Ruff's The Mirage? A really clever, audacious and underrated book.
― And according to some websites, there were “sexcapades.” (James Morrison), Friday, 24 May 2019 00:44

Not yet! Thanks for the rec! Will go for The Mirage next, then maybe Set This House in Order.

Rereading: Lorrie Moore, LIKE LIFE.

I went on a Moore binge in 2016.

Like Life is an astonishing collection. I think about the title story a lot.

I read The Mussel Feast by Birgitta Vanderbeke, A’s all and somewhat jagged German thing that takes place around a kitchen table.

And I read Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler which is told from the not-very-convincing first person point of view of a young woman, but it’s diverting enough I suppose.

After a winter/spring of heavy fiction I'm on a rock bio kick. Reread Goodbye 20th Century and Girl in a Band, and am now onto Duff McKagan's It's So Easy and Moby's Then It Fell Apart. All great and go down easy.

Don't sleep on Don Felder's Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (1974–2001)

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81x1VKPA2mL.jpg

Which reminds me: Aimless, anyone, what should I read by and about the Stoics? Also yoga. I need to cool it down.

Stoics? Aiyeee! imo, it's a philosophy that counters its inherent nihilism by invoking a set of moral values it cannot defend, apart from simply asserting it is better to keep a stiff upper lip and act as if you weren't really a nihilist, because otherwise nihilism is just too miserable.

But the gentlest and easiest to assimilate Stoic is Marcus Aurelius. The Enchiridion of Epictetus is basically a loose set of lecture notes jotted down by his student and it concentrates on laying down 'rules for living', kind of like self-help books. If you want a more systematic explanation, you'd need to find a more modern source. Maybe look at the Stoicism chapter in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy for a basic overview.

Strindberg, "Son of a Servant". Whingy, self-pitying proto-Emo, though if you're interested in politics and religion in Sweden in the 1860s this could be the book for you... any takers?

Also a fairly crappy book of literary criticism on Henry Green, published last year, full of typos and mistakes.

Two brief kindasorta historical novels: “Tell Them
Of Battles, Kings and Elephants” by Mathias Enard (Michelangelo goes to Constantinople, builds bridge) and “Moonstone - the boy who never was” by Sjòn (adventures of a promiscuous young fellow in a 1918 Iceland ravaged by the Spanish Flu). Very pleased I read both.

I loved that Sjon book, very vividly imagined.

Just started on this astonishing collection
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7xPrMAWwAgiGL3.jpg

soory, hueg

Getting to the end of The Year Of Reading Dangerously and would heartily recommend it, though I did skip the chapter on Houellebecq (life's too short) and Miller severely misinterprets Forster for his "writers hate the suburbs cos they hate the middle classes" pet theory. But it's a really great read.

Got a collection of Father Brown stories up next.

Strindberg, "Son of a Servant". Whingy, self-pitying proto-Emo, though if you're interested in politics and religion in Sweden in the 1860s this could be the book for you... any takers?

I read a political essay of his which was all "yes, the working man is oppressed by the ruling class, and when you think about it, isn't that a lot like how men are oppressed by women?". State of this guy.

Marooned : The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs ed by Phil Freeman
a collection of essays on desert island discs. Has some interesting choices. More alternative focus tahn the BBC show that had the concept way before it.

Theatre of teh oppressed Augusto Boal
brazilian writer's take on theatre.

christine schutt - a day, a night, another day, summer (some amazing sentences, it's short fiction on the edge of poetry but doesn't lose the plot entirely)
david means - instructions for a funeral (pretty good overall, hadn't read his other collections, a bit determinedly masculine or macho in places)

Finally finished Before the Storm. The only thing I would add to my earlier remarks would be the surprising degree to which Goldwater's campaign was solely the product of a few extremely sharp conservative operatives who seized on Goldwater's popularity to use him as a convenient front for their own agenda, without his consent or participation.

As I read the narrative Perlstein put together, it appears Goldwater knew he was being used and pushed into a campaign he didn't really want, so he sabotaged his own campaign by seizing it away from those operatives, who might have succeeded in electing him, and running it strictly according to his principles, which he seems to have known would result in his losing. Thus, he kept his self-esteem intact and punished his would-be puppet masters for pushing him into a campaign he hated. Right after Goldwater lost, those same puppet-masters tossed Goldwater back, took the electoral machine they'd built, and seized on Ronald Reagan, who was happy to oblige.

Marooned : The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs ed by Phil Freeman
a collection of essays on desert island discs. Has some interesting choices. More alternative focus tahn the BBC show that had the concept way before it.

enjoy Early '00s ILM: The Book. scott's and j0hn's pieces are still really incredible, i go back to them all the time

plus douglas wolk on stereolab

Am just about to start reading Mega City Zero by said Douglas Wolk

Mega City Two, sorry. Have just finished Mega City Zero...

Cool, looked like it would be interesting when I saw Marooned on shelf.
Have lookedat a couple of things so far not a lot. Have picked it up when I'm falling asleep which hasn't helped but has some interesting choices anyway.

Got some books from the London Library for a weekend trip: Red Shift, Beginning of Spring, Heavy Weather, and Outline. Outline is a bit like a book written by a very observant 15 year old, the sort of thing that gets published in a high school magazine. I like it though.

Re Strindberg, wasn't his big mad thing that he couldn't ever get over the idea that only a woman could know for sure her children were hers, whereas a man never could?

Strindberg, "Son of a Servant". Whingy, self-pitying proto-Emo, though if you're interested in politics and religion in Sweden in the 1860s this could be the book for you... any takers?

I read a political essay of his which was all "yes, the working man is oppressed by the ruling class, and when you think about it, isn't that a lot like how men are oppressed by women?". State of this guy.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 30 May 2019 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wait till the Tory party leadership contest gets going.

After all that Goldwater I needed a palate cleanser, so I'm reading My Friend Maigret, Georges Simenon.

I finished Richard Lloyd Parry's Ghosts of the Tsunami. His essay of the same title was brilliant (in the LRB) and this is a longer study of the same event. His framing device is the horror story of a particular primary school and from there he explores the cult of the ancestors and how the pathological passivity and deference of certain areas of Japanese society (arguably) led to an avoidable tragedy. It's a pretty shattering read.

I also read Jane Gardam's Old Filth. She's so good - brilliant at editing her characters just enough so they have a life beyond the page and are never suffocating, and she always stays just the right side of folksy and emotionally manipulative (albeit I could have done without the Queen Mum stuff). I will have to read everything.

As we get into summer I am going trhough a few short things:

Juan Goytisolo - The Blind Reader
Su Tong - Raise the Red Lantern
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying

Faulkner has some really striking passages -- and its not only becaise a parent dying just has a more powerful effect on me than it would've done a few years ago now -- and it overcomes what I tend to find difficult in Faulkner, as the South as a place is somewhat alien to me, but I think I have found my way into him and will be attempting his books again. There is a power to his writing.

John Ashbery - self portrait in a convex mirror

I finished James Salter's All That Is. It was pretty good, but maybe not as good as Light Years. I think it helped that the overall story was a bit more focused in that one. This one's still good though. Salter rarely comes out and tells you what his characters are feeling, instead he lets their feelings emerge from the story through careful choices of language, unshowy diction, and a kind of Greatest Generation laconic manly stoicism. The stories tend to wander with little rhyme or reason, sometimes detouring for a while to a minor character, yet they flow quite naturally, like a conversation one could imagine between close friends over drinks and dinner sharing confidences about mutual acquaintances (excepting of course the hot sex parts, which perhaps would be read to an even closer friend in more intimate circumstances). His choices of detail are painterly and preternaturally controlled.

Now I'm reading Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, recommended by someone on ILB, if I'm not mistaken.

Faulkner has some really striking passages -- and its not only becaise a parent dying just has a more powerful effect on me than it would've done a few years ago now -- and it overcomes what I tend to find difficult in Faulkner, as the South as a place is somewhat alien to me, but I think I have found my way into him and will be attempting his books again. There is a power to his writing.

― xyzzzz__

Wow! I'm reading Go Down, Moses.

Yeah, Faulkner is much more accessible and enjoyable than one might think, given the celebrated challenges of his style.

In addition there may be an off-putting element of his fan base to get past.

are there a thing? Like Berniebros?

I dunno. I just was driving around with some slackers decades ago and one said "I like Southern writers. What about you guys?" I responded first with "I like Flannery O'Connor" which was met with a pained silence which was rescued by "I like Faulkner." "Me too!"

I told one of those people another time, "I just watched a Luis Buñuel film" and got "Cool! Was it surreal?" I seemed to detect some sort of pattern.

Perhaps this is just anecdotal evidence.

"I love Bresson."

"Awesome! Did you notice overacting?"

That reminds of a different but probably related issue, more relevant to the original board perhaps, described by a good friend of mine by “You know you’re in trouble when someone says ‘I love the blues!’”

I'd that Eric Clapton, Robert Cray or who's the contemporary? Nick Cave?

Now I'm reading Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, recommended by someone on ILB, if I'm not mistaken.

― o. nate, 3. juni 2019 03:45 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I recommended it! Then I kinda got lost in it, needed to know about Singapore for a piece I was writing, read only about Singapore, then put it down for a while. Have just begun reading it again. Still good.

Also, I'm finishing the Book of Ezekiel today. I've been singing at a lot of confirmations lately, and at my church, the kids choose their bible words themselves. Wonder what happens if somebody chooses something from Ezekiel. 'And your words are from Ezekiel, chapter 16: “Therefore, you prostitute, hear the word of the Lord!"

Interesting vacillation in those Father Brown stories - first one gives a pretty sympathetic account of a militant atheist being bested by Brown's intelligence and taking it in a spirit of fair play; second story turns super reactionary and the amiability disappears.

On a tangent, am I right in thinking that most notable British x-ian writers are Catholic? Chesterton, Greene, Waugh. I guess CoE kinda has "don't think too much about it" built into it.

CS Lewis probably the biggest exception? but yes, disproportionate number of Catholic converts (Muriel Spark, too)

(for c20th fiction - things different in poetry - there's a strong Anglican line, basically because of Eliot I suspect)

Some non-converts: Anthony Burgess and David Lodge.

Last night I started my third-ever book by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Already I notice the distinctive marks of her style, her preferred themes, character types, sentence structures. While these are all good in their way, I can tell I will need to space out her books, so they do not quickly merge into a kind of Le Guin porridge.

picked up house of leaves today

xp Charlotte Brontë's Anti-Catholic Burns

xp I really enjoyed House of leaves when i chanced on it in the college library in the summer of 2003. I assume it must have been taught on one of the English courses in the year before since there were multiple copies of it there.
very odd.
I listened to a podcast on it recently. Not read anything else by the writer Danielewski. Is there anything else as good?

picked up house of leaves today

and boy are my arms tired!

What's the House of Leaves podcast? I love the damn book; I think about it most days without really being able to say why.

I started John Banville's The Untouchable. I'm frequently dazzled by Banville but, god, it's so full up. I get that the narrator is a SPY and the web of his noticing would be preternatural, but some of the sentences are almost parodically overstuffed.

That's the only Banville novel whose otiose sentences don't sink it.

I'm reading:

Fiona MacCarthy - Byron: Life and Legend
Alejo Carpentier - Reasons of State

xp

I can see the moment: the thin October sunlight on the parquet, a curl of steam from the teapot's spout, the somehow evil glitter of the marmalade in its cut-glass dish, and my father and Hettie waiting like frightened children to hear what London thought.

Evil glitter!

p down with evil glitter

House of Leaves Podcast was an episode of Overdue. #265 I think

I enjoyed Danielewski’s subsequent novel, Only Revolutions, I like things that play with the format of the novel to some effect, and you have to keep turning this one over and around. I haven’t read House of Leaves so I can’t compare.

I read a few of W.B. Yeats's plays: THE POT OF BROTH; AT THE HAWK'S WELL; THE CAT & THE MOON - in THE COLLECTED PLAYS OF W.B. YEATS.

I return yet again to Empson's SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. I don't think I am a quarter through it. It is very dense.

That's the only Banville novel whose otiose sentences don't sink it.

It's the only Banville novel i haven't finished - the main character was a huge dick and i didn't want to deal with him. I'm fine with his sentences, it's the endless parade of sad post middle aged men that started to grate.

I think of Banville as my least favourite writer - though clearly there is much competition.

Finished Red Shift at a suitably spooky Midlands cottage this weekend. Wow. I’ve never read any Garner before but I was pretty blown away - even though it’s a hard, austere book and not much fun to read! - and it keeps getting bigger in my head since I finished it. I guess I was expecting some sort of angsty, proto-YA adventure novel, but instead I got this astonishing, weird, idea-stacked modernist masterpiece - I’ve never read anything like it. Plus it’s SUPER SAD. Good little book.

red shift fuckin rules

greatest ya novel i've ever read bc it makes that category extremely fuckin meaningless

I wanna go back and read everything he’s done in order (once I’ve fisnished doing the same for Penelope Fitzgerald)

That ending stayed with me like few others.

I found Red Shift tough going but have had a similar experience of it mushrooming in my imagination. It's a bit like Monk in that the elisions are where the magic is happening.

The Tony Shalhoub procedural?

Well, you needn’t.

I was a little delirious when I wrote that. I meant Thelonious Monk. The meaning being in the gaps and the weird breaks.

just finished will eaves’ “murmur”. really beautiful book

^^^^^^^ 1000x

Antonio Munoz Molina - Like a Fading Shadow
Rachel Cusk - Outline

Two similar autofictiony novels around writing, creation. Both conversational, both full of flat sentences (and not in a bad way at all).

Short intro on French Revolution.

I'm about 85% through The Dispossessed. It is an interesting book to me, mostly for reasons other than what Le Guin wanted me to be interested in. It is both crammed with matter and action, while at the same time it is oddly impoverished. The plot has managed to incorporate a couple dozen themes, including (but not limited to) exile, linguistics, the physics of time, cultural norms, anarchy, dreams, capitalism, sexuality, proxy war, censorship, ecology, marriage, the role of the scientist in an economy, and class war.

Le Guin obviously was an intelligent, curious and perceptive person who investigated every academic subject she encountered and thought broadly about global current events. She has an incisive opinion on all these themes and weaves them all into a story that has a convenient hook upon which she can hang each of these incisive opinions and perspectives. But all these abundant ideas are given only brief notice before passing on to the next one. Each is a little capsule of intellect, but each contains no more than that. They're provocative hints, but stop there.

For me, this makes it a queer sort of novel. Kind of like eating a 24 course meal of intellectual tapas or dim sum. Or watching a film festival showing with 90 minutes worth of 3 minute animations. How she did this is a fascination to me, mainly because of its novelty compared to my normal reading, but I'm fairly sure that almost nothing of this book will stick with me past the moment I read the last page.

Last night I started reading The Day of the Owl, Leonardo Sciascia. It's an NYRB reissue of a Sicilian author; it was written in 1961 and concerns a mafia killing. Good so far.

Sciascia is genuinely great IMO.

Gert Hofmann, The Parable of the Blind: wonderful

Cool! Is it translated by his son, Michael Hofmann: poet, translator, critic?

Been a long time since I read The Dispossessed--early 90s, if not late 80s---but what's stayed with me is the sense of a group, which sees itself/has inherited the self-image of a principled community, now challenged by the option of taking a chance on unprecedented adaptation (true to the spirit, not the letter?), or of trying to stay the course, and maybe stagnating at best.

Present-buying question. Can anyone recommend any good travel journalism or non-fiction about Australia, that's not written from a Brit/white/outsider perspective?

Not a Michael Hofmann translation--though he does write an afterword! It's a Christopher Middleton translation.

Off the top of my head, recenti-ish Australian non-fic by Australians, would recommend
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/leviathan-9781742741628 (excellent, blackly funny history of Sydney)
http://www.nicholasjose.com.au/books/black-sheep-journey-to-borroloola/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tall_Man:_Death_and_Life_on_Palm_Island (true crime)

Travel: this is a series by novelists about their home cities. Haven't read the one on Brisbane, but be warned that the author is a nitwit.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/67917

Edouard Louis - Who Killed My Father - read this for university, I guess pop auto-fiction with a short, sharp, political message about France. It's sort of written as a letter to the author's father, personal relationships mixed with the father's industrial injury and subsequent struggles with the state.

I guess I feel like auto-fiction or creative nonfiction seems incredibly fashionable and I'm a bit suspicious of it all. Dunno if it's the Catholic in me but it sort of feels like the literary equivalent of a selfie. This was a decent personal story though.

I'm nearing the end of the collected stories of John McGahern which I think I mentioned upthread. It's been on the Kindle app on my phone for times when I don't have a papperback. A really giant collection, so much mournful Catholic regret. Like anything that comprehensive it is not without its duds. The meandering, meditative and I suppose emotionally soft nature of the stories is sometimes refreshing and other times just old-fashioned. Still, it has the same deep compassion for its characters as William Trevor or the like, I enjoy that a lot.

paperback* ffs

A history of Korea by Kyung Moon Hwang, in anticipation of visiting (South) Korea for my honeymoon.

I finished The Day of the Owl last night. It conveys what seems like a very accurate picture of how the mafia was deeply enmeshed in the fabric of rural Sicily and how it operated when the book was written in 1961, and it does so with great economy of plot and detail. The characters are beautifully drawn with a minimum of strokes, too. Very good stuff.

I'm now about 50 pp. into Vertigo, Sebald. So far it seems rather disjointed and pointless to me. He writes one sentence after another and each successive sentence tracks with the preceding one, but they never culminate in anything noteworthy. I'll keep trying, but this book may be one of my failures to thrive.

Sebald makes me feel like I'm really not getting something. It reads like dull wittering to me, like being trapped inside a boring Harper's article for all eternity.

The best I can make out so far is that the reader is asked to be held in a state of cumulative admiration for the calm purity of the author's prose. What I cannot figure out yet is what end all that calm purity is written to serve. Maybe that will emerge later on, but any end we might be travelling toward is obscured by a complete lack of purposeful direction.

haven't been on ILB for a while, so am a bit ring rusty:

Fireflies – Luis Sagasti trans. Fionn Petch. I did not enjoy this book, but wonder whether I missed something. There's a sort of book which contains essayistic observations on a range of often quite disparate things and in some way links them together. I struggle with these sorts of books. Eliot's phrase from The Waste Land always pops into my head

'On Margate Sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing'

Or connecting anything with nothing, or anything with anything. It feels like writing on easy mode, and the lack of constraint means nothing really emerges out of the text. I think the most successful aspect was its forced metaphysics where the mouth is a cervical passage, which can both give birth to a void and accept a void in, and the irreducible elements of the cosmos are the stars and the cold only. It's spare and weird, and yes, forced, and I liked it. The book also reminded me I should read some Bashō.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein. Very good this. Been on my pile for a while, but never got round to it because I felt it would probably cover the same ground as philosopher Ian Hacking's The Taming of Chance. And so it does, but it's got a different focus, more on the practical applications of understanding future probabilities than their philosophical implications. The chapters are nicely shaped around the various mathematicians, scientists and social thinkers who have developed this area, and Bernstein writes clearly. One big takeaway is how easy it was to troll Johann Gauss:

Gauss took special pride in his achievements in astronomy, feeling that he was following in the footsteps of Newton, his great hero. Given his admiration for Newton’s discoveries, he grew apoplectic at any reference to the story that the fall of an apple on Newton’s head had been the inspiration for discovering the law of gravity.

Journals - RF Langley. Really great. I'll update on the journals thread as there's plenty that deserves attention. A Gerard Hopkins level of attention to the natural world, especially the insects, but also a non-Hopkins of how the world around him relates to feeling, sensation, understanding and (artistic) expression – the Romantic logic in a non-Romantic age. One passage in particular struck me. Langley is driving his car along the wintry Suffolk country roads with his companion Barbara:

..I take a stretch of the road too fast, lose all control, and we twist, first into the opposite lane, on the compacted snow, then spin right round to the left and mount the verge into a drift and the hedge, where the car stalls. The only other car on the scene, following us, stops, and I see the driver agape. Complete unshaken, for some reason, I referse out of the drift onto the road, facing back towards Southwold, nod to him as he mouths 'All right?' and drive back to the entrance to the girls' school, where we turn round. .. What might have happened did not. Goldwater did not become President. A meteorite has not yet blasted the Earth. It helps to narrow down the line to what did happen, and strip the swathings of possibles away. But I don't know what happened, in any final way, as I drove off the road. Even as it happened I was blaming Barbara, blaming the tape of Russian chant we had on the recorder, both such crass miswritings that they have nothing extra to tell, because I already know that sort of cheapness in myself.

Miswritings. The use of the word here fascinates me. Not misreadings. My immediate notes (not very good, sorry), were this:

Our continual and immediate midrashic commentary on the world. The world is rich, infinitely interpretable (or containing so much it is inexhaustible - not infinite, not the same as infinity which is a sort of logical nihilism). “Or does it leak” (after RFL has iterated the minute domestic sounds and clankings as an example of the continual richness to be found at any time and in any place).

Our midrashic commentary is also inexhaustible but is separate to that which the world contains (tho as we know the world must also contain it) meaning it may catch it correctly at times, is enough to be able to get on with, at times, and can be miswritten, deliberately or otherwise.

and so the importance of poetry, see also the end of the remarkable entry in the church from August 1988:

"The image that comes unexpectedly, not illustrating a predetermined thought or mood. That poetry should be like that. To fetch the sudden, shining fish in your bill. Riskily."

later, studying an unnameable insect making its toilsome way across the railway bridge ledge (p99):

> There is nothing for it to look forward to. *It will never be seen by anyone who has words again*. (my italics)

or

> Leaves and words. A general tumbling around what is proper, what might cover the situation.

Europe at Dawn - the last of Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe trilogy, which I've enjoyed less and less as it's gone on. Thought 1&2 were great. Struggled to keep up with the cast of 3&4, and found some of the writing a bit painful. The conceit was less interesting once it was fully uncovered I think. Also, on an editing note, how do you get two passages like this within a page of each other?

Amsterdam was a quiet, haunted place. The Low Countries had been hit hard by the Xian Flu and for a long time, even after the pandemic had burned itself out, very few tourists had come here. The trade still hadn’t recovered in any meaningful way;

The place was half empty. The Netherlands had borne the brunt of the Xian Flu, and unlike, say, England, they had somehow not quite bounced back. Alice couldn’t remember how many people they had lost but she knew it was a large percentage of the fifty million or so who had died in Europe during the pandemic. There was a reflective, slightly haunted feeling about Amsterdam which grew even worse once you were out in the countryside.

Territory of Light – Yūko Tsushima. Loved this. In a sense its a sort of micro-genre with which we're very familiar now. A young woman with a child, managing a break up which is like much else opaque and confusing to her. The immediate thing I was reminded of when reading was Elena Ferrante. But of course this was published in 1979, in Japan. An observation I didn't make until quite late, and felt it applies to Ferrante as well, tho haven't gone back to check, is that the way the material of the emnotional crisis is managed is in an extremely *sensory* way, that is the content of the book. Sensory confusions, breakdowns, and interpretations, moments of relief and intense oppression. That's separating out the elements too much: this is an emotional-sensory experience. The crisis of sensation and emotion that is a young child.

Some other points of note: this was serialised in chapters, and remembering that when you're reading gives each chapter the sense of a pearl on a necklace. Independent of, but belonging to, the 'novel'. The chapters will often be centred round a dream – that sensory presentation allows for a wonderful interpenetration of the dream and quotidian world. Psychic fear appears in incongruous places.

There are shadowy figures of oppression around here (representative you feel of the sexual politics of Japan at the time, a subject I know nothing about). But there are also strange allies. An immobile drunk, a passive student, oddly sexualised dream figures. These allies are characterised by physical *presence*. They may be or seem unpleasant or unhelpful in themselves, but the solidity of their bodies helps the mother and daughter through the book.

This is not, as far as I am aware, an autobiographical book, yet an extraordinary passage towards the end seems to contain the force of the novel, and acquires its force from the knowledge that Tsushima's father, the writer Osamu Dazai, committed suicide when she was one. This passage seems in some ways to provide the key to what the book has at its heart and emphasises why the need for physical bodies is expressed in the book.

I guess I feel like auto-fiction or creative nonfiction seems incredibly fashionable and I'm a bit suspicious of it all. Dunno if it's the Catholic in me but it sort of feels like the literary equivalent of a selfie. This was a decent personal story though.

i’d add zin

Sebald makes me feel like I'm really not getting something. It reads like dull wittering to me, like being trapped inside a boring Harper's article for all eternity.

After reading another ~50 pp. of Vertigo last night, I decided to lay it aside for something else. My second notable 'fail' this year. Some day I might try another of his books to see what he has to offer, but not this one.

@wins I understood auto-fiction to be a term which is quite old, that's the context in which I heard of it. I think it's hard to deny writing about the self, creative non-fiction, call it what you will, is in fashion though. It is huge in academia and there are a lot of best sellers.

I don't know if that quote sheds much light for me, of course all fiction draws on the self and at some point the two blend into each other, but some of the non-fiction that's popular at the moment is pretty deeply about the self in a way that goes beyond the smoke and mirrors or fiction.

As for the selfie thing, I mean I don't generally dismiss the selfie either but I cited them generally as I think at worst they can be symptomatic of an age or narcissism. Sometimes in creative non-fiction I find myself thinking I am bored by the writer's determination to aggrandise their own life. It's not quite the same as disliking a character in a work of fiction, to me.

*of - both times

I know the term’s been around awhile, just suggesting the concept is older (Proust et al as Laing cites), also didn’t mean to suggest it isn’t a thing that’s au courant with varying levels of success. I guess I’m wondering if there’s an objection to the premise itself as opposed to the examples you’ve read, and do you have the same issues (“the writer's determination to aggrandise their own life”) with “straight” memoir?

they can be symptomatic of an age of narcissism

My sense is that public life has grown so disconnected from the wellsprings of meaningful action that people are turning inward to a degree that was not common back when communities were smaller and more isolated. People are feeling that the power to effect change has drifted away from them, flowing upward to concentrate in ever more remote and 'elite' centers they feel no connection to and have no influence upon. I would guess that this trend is not due to narcissism so much as social fragmentation.

It is hard for me to distinguish it from memoir at this point - I'm coming to the end of a creative writing MA and there were two separate modules for this type of writing, "creative non-fiction" and "writing the self". I didn't take either of them but I've read a lot of work of that type as a result of swapping stuff or seeing people's work in the wild. A lot of it was like memoir, a bit.

Except my feeling is that memoir or eg the sort of non-fiction I probably read via the Longform website every day tend to be very concerned with representing the facts as far as possible, whereas maybe these more modern forms seem to fictionalise factual stories freely, or even disregard facts.

Yet they're still putting themselves as characters in the story, it just feels sort of disingenuous to me.

I guess something like Knausgaard felt so boring, deliberately and otherwise, that my only concerns about the "truth" were the ethical side of things as regards his family etc, which I don't really have to think about I suppose. But it's still bad if I do.

Louis's book felt very true to me, though for all I know it isn't. In parts I guess I felt like a person insisting to me that I be concerned with minute details of their life and their suffering but with no sense of trust that they're not lying to me. And yes I could just run with it regardless, I sort of can.

But when I read this style and it's classmates or people I know, it can be more difficult to allow them the leeway and easier to guess what's fabricated, that sort of makes it all feel a bit like a house of cards.

I suppose I think at heart most people's lives aren't interesting enough to merit being made into auto-fiction. I definitely think that about my own life, even the parts I know I'd be encouraged to write about if I took an auto-fiction class.

It feels sort of egotistical whereas I've found writing fiction to be a process that strips away a lot of that. It is very hard to extricate from two years of a lot of change in how I think about books and stories though, so apologies if none of that makes sense.

xpost

TLDR I sometimes feel emotionally manipulated by it

Read and enjoyed Dave Weigel's prog history. Now working my way through Grand Hotel Abyss, was tough going for the first 60 pages, but really opens up after that. Great introduction to the work and personalities of the Frankfurt School, putting them in much needed historical context.

Which of these doorstoppers should I try to tackle next?

2666
The Pale King
The Silmarillion
1919 (Pt 2 of USA trilogy)
Gravity's Rainbow

I "enjoyed" 2666 and can recommend it as a highly worthwhile book. But it can be harrowing at times. I found The Pale King to be uneven and fitfully interesting. I could not finish Gravity's Rainbow. The others, I can't say.

That makes perfect sense fh. I think I’d need to read more of the stuff that’s lumped in with this (have read like 10 pages of knausgaard) but I have a feeling the things that bother you wouldn’t bother me if I thought the writing had merit otherwise

I see that, like in a way they are sort of technicalities. I feel like this shouldn't matter in art but maybe my MA gives me a sort of warped sense of this, plus it makes me speculate about "what if I personally knew this writer" - again a technicality.

I saw Julian Barnes speak a year ago (never read any of his books) and he said "fiction is telling hard exact truths through beautiful elaborate lies" and it's one of my favourite quotes about writing, but to me maybe auto-fiction etc is that inverted.

gravity's rainbow is extremely rewarding but takes a lot of effort

which reminds me that if i ever finish doctor faustus i really want to read mason & dixon next

I have started Doctor Faustus four times. Yet I read Joseph and His Brothers blissfully, wishing it were 16 volumes.

As for Sebald, Aimless, Vertigo is his least interesting "novel." The Emigrants, which at least presents itself as a story collection, has a couple of gems. His best work is Austerlitz, which also presents itself as a meditation on post-Napoleonic Europe.

Finally, I don't wish to connect them other than they write a fiction that's purportedly autobiographical but I doubt is, I vastly prefer Elena Ferrante to Knausgaard. She has a relish for basic narrative besides a curiosity about other people that makes Knausgaard look insufferable.

I’m the kind of degenerate who loves and agrees with every good “fiction is <x>” quote while absently gathering up counterexamples in my mind

xp Ferrante I have read (the first Neapolitan novel) but was unsure if that even purports to be autobiographical

I never assume anything is autobiographical, despite the artist's best efforts to promote it as such. I know how it works.

at the moment:

- re-reading Etel Adnan's The Arab Apocalypse, which remains one of the most harrowing poems I've ever read.

- a catalog of Dana Claxton's first major retrospective

- the introductory pages to a massive and rare Lakota/English dictionary that my friend gave to me

- Christa Wolf's Accident: A Day's News, which i purchased for a dollar at the local sidewalk sale today

i should probably really get on reading more to prepare for my classes this fall, but oh well.

the rings of saturn is my favorite book, vertigo is a very early draft of what he ends up achieving there

re: sebald, which i feel like i end up in a sebald conversation on ilx at least once a month

an addendum to the auto-fiction piece - although it didn’t have the name at the time Jocelyn Brooke writes in this mode and i wrote fairly extensively about the opportunities and problems it presents here.

It helps that Brooke is an exceptional writer. But there are some specifics that i think led him to this mode. he cites his shyness, and also wanting to avoid “the laws of libel”, and between the two seems to sit Brooke’s only partially successfully expressed sexuality, which is of a part with a habitual self-effacement and irony.

the autobiographical mode appears to be chosen because he had a strong sense of the places he inhabits, and the people who he has encountered. the self-effacement and laws of libel, the imperative of art and aesthetic means he sifts the elements into fiction.

it works very well, for me.

it is i think as Alfred said - it can be unclear even when an author states a thing to be one or the other, whether that is in fact the case. both involve emphasis and selection.

Brooke quotes Thomas Browne in relation to this very matter:

Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths; Wherein Falsehood and Truth seem almost aequilibriously stated, and but a few grains of distinction to bear down the balance... Besides, many things are known, as some are seen, that is by Parallaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper beings, the superficial regard of things having a different aspect from their true and central Natures.

I tried to re-read Austerlitz a year or so ago and found it too much. It has a kind of structural melancholy that seeps into your bones. Like all Sebald's first-person narrators the story the narrator is really telling - beneath the still surface of his tightly controlled sentences - is of actual and deferred silence. All of his work seems to orbit this absence and I think that's why it possible to find him directionless or not providing nourishment.

I need to think about Fizzles' post about Langley. He's a magician.

I need to think about Fizzles' post about Langley. He's a magician.

I looked it up! I can totally see how Langley is a kind of mystic, reading nature as a holy text (without the attendant naffness that that implies - eg like Iain Sinclair at his worst).

Finally, I don't wish to connect them other than they write a fiction that's purportedly autobiographical but I doubt is, I vastly prefer Elena Ferrante to Knausgaard. She has a relish for basic narrative besides a curiosity about other people that makes Knausgaard look insufferable.

Jumping into this, if you put craft to one side (which you can't ofc) I think part of my enjoyment of Ferrante is that to me it is inherently fascinating to hear about what it was like growing up poor in 1950's Naples, and I'm more than willing to take some embellishments along with that (assume most ppl talking about "the old days" irl are embellishing to make their narratives more interesting too, besides memory being an unreliable narrator anyway). Hiero's fellow student's experiences will probably be fascinating on that level too, in some future and for people in different places, tho I see that this doesn't make them any more interesting here and now.

Semi-related: I sometimes feel like proto-reality tv - Chronicle Of A Summer, Place De La Repúblique, the Up series, as well as oral histories, Studs Terkel's stuff - is my favourite genre in any medium, tho i don't care much about reality TV itself.

I'm reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, translated by Bernard Scudder. I've read nearly one Icelandic saga per year for about a decade now. It's been a good run, but this may be about the last one I'm interested in.

180pp into Empson, after a digression back into Finnegans Wake with HOW JOYCE WROTE 'FINNEGANS WAKE' and Burgess's SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE.

This last does seem a real way that one could read the book (I have read the book) but even with the clarifying frames every few pages there is still often a sense of hypnotic drift among the sounds. But then, line by line it is often clear enough. So perhaps the drift is a version of what happens with so much reading, not just FW.

Burgess's introduction is admirable but tends to confirm my long-held view that the frame / story of the book is not good and doesn't do justice to its texture.

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is not rewarding and takes a lot of effort.

About to start Roadside Picnic. Hurrah. I really want to read russian lit. Only book I read is bulgakov’ master n marg.

Burgess's SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE.

I bought this in a charity shop a couple of weeks ago. My copy of Finnegans Wake found itself in a burn while I was feeding ducks. :(

(I rescued it, but now it's about twice as thick)

About to start Roadside Picnic. Hurrah. I really want to read russian lit. Only book I read is bulgakov’ master n marg.

Babel, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy all better than that bullshit imo

GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is not rewarding and takes a lot of effort.

― the pinefox, Monday, June 17, 2019 11:57 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

come on, not even the franz pökler sequence? the flash forward at the end?

the lightbulb? so many rewards imo

also Zemyatin's "We", of course

but if you want amazing Russian sf this is yr guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Pelevin - Omon Ra, Buddha's Little Finger, the Life of Insects, or Babylon/Generation Pi/Homo Zapiens are good starting points

avoid this asshole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Sorokin

xp

I'm reading Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis, which is provocative to say the least. Compelling and readable, relatively light on assumed background in the language of Marxist theorizing. (Like if you've read Rius' seminal Marx para principiantes you'll do ok)

yeah gravity's rainbow is rewarding, i did find it incredibly hard to read in parts and didn't know wth was going on at the end there but still, def worth reading

GR blew my mind when I was 20. I’m kind of scared to return to it now.

i reread it last year and it was still awesome. not perfect or anything, i think the overriding slapsticky tone dulls the emotional impact of other parts of the book, but this is a v minor complaint

It's a gas

enjoying the endless hemming and hawing of border districts by gerald murnane. i also bought a nice hardback of the golden bowl that i'm going to try soon.

still haven't read it, been looking for a long novel to read fresh

As soon as I posted my entry, I thght: omfg i forgot to mention Nabokov. But in some fucked up way I don’t regard him as a Russian writer. I know I know. :-(

I will def read We.

which reminds me that if i ever finish doctor faustus i really want to read mason & dixon next

hey brad how far in are you

roadside picnic is marvellous.

Brad Nelson, I found GR very difficult, took years to read it and, to be succinct, I hated it.

The one interesting thing from my POV might be why people can be so different ie: why other people who on some counts share tastes and views of mine feel so differently about GR. You could say it's because they read it lots of times and I didn't; but then I didn't because it was so difficult and so unrewarding. To read it again would not have been a good use of this limited lifetime. I suppose I will never read it again. I need to read THE FAERIE QUEENE first. I wonder if that's better?

I do feel that GR has a relation or a resemblance to Finnegans Wake, which from my POV is one shorthand way of naming some of what worries me about FW, even though I try to reconcile myself to FW these days.

Roadside Picnic = good not bad

We = bad not good

Roadside Picnic is indeed very good.

As we begin summer I finished Jose Saramago's Blindness, which I think is a weaker effort only because I take a heavy disliking to dystopian fiction these days, his writing nearly overcomes the poverty of the imagination that comes with the genre. Now nearly done with Quincas Borba by Machado de Assis - it uses a lot of tricks that just weren't utilised in fiction at the time (or that I've come across anyway): the self-commentary on the plot for one, as it happens, and then the plot of transmigration of a philosopher's soul to his dog that just is only mentioned now and then as the narrative then concentrates on his friend and his dealings with high society in Imperial 19th century Brazil. It reminds me a bit of Donald Barthelme but I should re-read to check (I won't, don't have his books anymore).

We should have a new thread?

hey brad how far in are you

― j., Tuesday, June 18, 2019 8:28 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

about 200 pages

I started reading The Siege of Krishnapur, J. G. Farrell, but I'm not far enough into it yet to feel any lasting commitment. He was setting up the romantic interest as I set it down for the night and that direction did not bode well.

I read Claire Dederer's (not rhymed with Federer) memoir Love and Trouble. I loved it. It's kind of a mess but that fits with her flailing around trying to find a narrative for what she's experiencing (a midlife crisis, essentially, but within that is her coming to terms with her marriage, her attitude to sex - now and throughout her life) and also this kind of folksy dialectic she's aiming for. Apologies if I've made that sound shit because it really isn't. It's honest and questing and consoling.

She wrote a great essay for the Paris Review a while back; I was hooked on her from that: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/

hey brad how far in are you

― j., Tuesday, June 18, 2019 8:28 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

about 200 pages

― american bradass (BradNelson), Sunday, June 23, 2019 8:52 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could maybe get in on that! we should combine our earnest efforts

I finished SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY - its density required a lot of effort. Brilliant, but it doesn't have much momentum; there's little overall movement in the argument, save that the 7th type is somehow more dramatic than the others in combining opposites.

It's notorious that Empson hardly believed in the types and thought they could hardly be distinguished. I often couldn't really tell what a particular type was doing, or make out how an example was serving a particular one of the 7 ideas. And most of what he says about opposites in that late section is hard to follow, to the point of mysticism.

Why I like it is a) the great pedantic attention to detail, with his particular brand of paraphrase of the verse; b) his great readiness to offer cranky digressions and statements on almost anything; c) his awesome knowledge of the English poetic canon. It made me reflect that almost no one now has this, and that I should work at it myself.

Flann O'Brien short pieces / stories translated from Irish: a couple very good and anticipating great later works.

Terry Eagleton, HUMOUR.

(checks watch) Holy cow! It is summer!

Time for a new the WAYR thread, so the cleaning staff can come in and vacuum up the crumbs, polish the sideboard, remove the candle stubs from the candelabra, and toss sheets over the furniture.

> the cleaning staff can come in and vacuum up the crumbs

just leave it to the langoliers.

Don’t know which thread to put this on, but there is a feature up on The NY Times in which they list their favorite 50 memoirs of the past 50 years or so. Lots of things added to my wishlist.

I went and did it. There is now a Summer 2019 WAYR thread. Please inspect it carefully for damage inflicted during transport before taking delivery.

www link: 2019 Sum-Sum-Summertime: What Are You Reading, My Good People?