Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

The seasons change and so do we. What are you reading now?

A successor thread to Summer 2020: What Are You Reading as the Sun Bakes the Arctic Ocean?

C.L.R. James - The Black Jacobins

Wycherley Woman - Ross Macdonald. Loved The Chill & The Galton Case, gonna start reading them in sequence from here.

Thanks for the Fitzgerald biography recommendation Dow! – I’ve got a copy at home, gonna scan through to help myself decipher the last two novels a bit better

The Macdonald novels before The Galton Case are good too. The one right before that, The Doomsters, marks the point at which he started moving into his late psychodrama style, focusing on Archer's protection of vulnerable young people. The first half-dozen in the series are more straightforward hardboiled novels in the Chandler mode. They're all memorable.

There's a well-known letter in which Chandler rips up the first Archer novel, The Moving Target, sneering at some stylistic weaknesses; between the lines one can see his frustration with a younger author threatening to do his schtick better.

Love The Black Jacobins. One of the most inspiring moments in human history.

Speaking of Chandler and Macdonald, I am reading Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett. Technically I'm re-reading it, but the first time was during the last century and not one detail of it remains in my memory.

I addressed my previous book, I'm Still Here, Austin Channing Brown, in the prior thread, but will state that it is just the kind of book designed to be read by many millions of Americans, bearing witness to what whiteness feels like when you are a Black woman on the receiving end of it. It is simple, clear, direct and very short, so that even reluctant readers can encompass it easily. It also speaks most directly to professed Christians, which is a plus.

It's funny, Aimless, because the Christian address aspect of that particular book is what turned me off from reading it.

I've been a long time reading, and now at last I am a mere 100 pages from the end of Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. As I draw closer to the Civil War, I find myself slowing down and consulting other works, to try to synthesize a bigger picture -- most recently, I started The Field of Blood by Joanne Freeman, on congressional violence and the 'affective history' of debate over slavery and the union. But I also want to go back and study the period of Indian removal in greater detail, as it was largely passed over in Baptist's New Orleans-centered account of the 1820s and '30s.

xp -You were far from her ideal audience, table. I am closer to it. For me the value of the book being cast in a framework of Christianity is that it has a much greater chance of reaching the audience that has most need of the information it contains. It is a primer, well-designed to spread itself through the Christian grapevine of churches and Xtian bookstores. I applaud that approach and hope it permeates that audience. And it was good reinforcement for me, too.

A little over 100 pages left of Ulysses. Supplemented by the Great Courses and Edna O'Brien's short Joyce bio.

You're certainly right, Aimless, particularly around yr hopes for how the book will circulate. Might be useful for a class in the future, though, so it is still in the pile!

the rings of saturn. it's good but sheesh lighten up a little would ya bill

the best parts are the more straightforward stories imo. it strengthens my opinion that lengthy descriptions of dreams always make for tedious reading.

winfried not bill, sorry winfried

Red Harvest certainly earned its title. I can see why no one yet has made a film of the original novel, as written, but also why Kurosawa thought the novel's general premise was worth adapting to film.

How does it seem not suited for film? Been a long time since I read, but thought it was good, and seems to be gen. regarded as his best novel, although The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are good in lighter ways. Premise-wise the or a precedent is Goldoni's The or A Servant of Two Masters (thanx and a tip of the Hatlo hat to James Blech for pointing this out to me).

Just a few ideas that strike me about the obstacles to filming Red Harvest:

• The intricacies of the action and characters would need to be considerably streamlined from what the book presents you with, so that audiences could concentrate on the story, which is the main interest, instead of constantly running to keep up with the plot.

• Since the novel is a first person narration, the screenwriter, director and actors would need to find filmic ways to handle a ton of exposition or the film would be voice-over narration constantly.

• The Continental Op (main character) is somewhat underdeveloped in the book. He is an avenger with nothing to avenge.

I'm reading The Devil Finds Work, a group of 1970s essays by James Baldwin that center around various films, novels and plays; he uses them to shed light on the topic of most of his essays: being Black or white in the USA. This collection is a bit more obscure, but it is included in the Library of America compendium of his essays and that's where I'm reading it.

xpost I thought of the Op as being offended by local leaders expecting him to do their dirty work beyond his standards of professional amorality---they want him to get positively immoral, too close to moral, euuuwww. So he does, but in his own way, getting pulled in beyond his usual experience of course, winging it more than advisable. But overall I see what you mean.

Mainly I am still rereading James Joyce, STEPHEN HERO. It's much more enjoyable / readable than I remembered - in a way Joyce's most direct fiction ever, and his most politically explicit.

I am also perhaps still reading Ferriter's A NATION AND NOT A RABBLE but I've been somewhat disappointed with that.

And a third Irish book: Terry Eagleton, CRAZY JOHN AND THE BISHOP: the very long essay on 'The Good-Natured Gael' is my bedtime reading. Currently on a section about Oliver Goldsmith. The scholarship in this book, from one (TE) who isn't really a specialist in the field, is staggering.

'm reading The Devil Finds Work, a group of 1970s essays by James Baldwin that center around various films, novels and plays; he uses them to shed light on the topic of most of his essays: being Black or white in the USA. This collection is a bit more obscure, but it is included in the Library of America compendium of his essays and that's where I'm reading it.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless)

one of my essential film studies texts

How does it seem not suited for film? Been a long time since I read, but thought it was good, and seems to be gen. regarded as his best novel, although The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are good in lighter ways. Premise-wise the or a precedent is Goldoni's The or A Servant of Two Masters (thanx and a tip of the Hatlo hat to James Blech for pointing this out to me).

https://filmgoersguide.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/servant-of-two-masters/

Terry Eagleton's long, erudite section on Goldsmith (on whom he'd never previously written) moves on to a more predictable section on Sterne. An even more predictable section on Burke will probably follow.

Halfway through Perfect Sound Whatever. Really enjoy the concept - Acaster is convinced 2016 was the best year for music ever and just keeps investigating records from that time - because it's neither an antiquarian task like doing the same for, say, 1971, nor the usual drudgery of trying to keep up with new releases for the year and forgetting about them all come January. Sadly he's no music critic - the book awakwardly tries to tie albums into his personal travails of that year in a very artificial manner. When he's talking about his life he's funny and touching; when he's talking about the music it all just feels like regurgitated press releases.

It also strikes me that a book about music written by a stand-up comedian is probably a true vision of hell for a lot of ILX ppl.

Yes.

Is he generally convinced of this, or just pretending to be?

Bit of both? I think he's generally convinced that there's an astonishing wealth of good music from that year that he wants to share. He probably realises this is also true of every year.

there's a podcast on a bbc sounds about it all. i like him, but when he was on Later... talking about it his music taste struck me as bad, so i haven't listened.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p089rfmk

i finished rings of saturn and am about halfway through austerlitz. i'm enjoying its relative straightforwardness.

The podcast's better than the book I think, earnest enthusiasm does more on an audio medium.

Jorge Luis Borges - The Total Library Non-Fiction 1922-1986

500 pages worth of essays and (later in life, due to what seems like a mixture of further fame and blindness) transcried talks. The essays up to 1955 or so (pre-blindness) are a series of optical illusions. He has an incredible ability to convey the essence of a whatever he is reading or seeing (about a dozen film reviews here) in about 3/4 highly satisfying pages that also manage to display the sense that he has read about half a dozen books on that book or author (this could be another optical illusion but maybe if you spend all your life reading or writing that might be true, either that or he has good skim-reading ability). That's whether he is writing for a journal, the desk, or a woman's magazine. Throughout, we have a series of slightly longer essays that seem like 3/4 pages stitched together, as he talks about the translators of The Arabian Nights (v interesting discussion of Orientalism as a thing before Said?) Benjamin's essay on it gets far more hits than Borges and while there isn't a take on it per se that isn't fused with the books he discusses it feels a little unfair. I love his 20 pages on Dante, just different aspects of the book, on Icelandic Sagas, on Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát (this was a marvel, his account of Fitzgerald felt like a short story!), Flaubert, Gibbon, Coleridge, and first reads of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner as being published for the first time - his reckoning with modernism and sharp judgment (the way he is so open to what Joyce does on Ulysses while at the same time struggling through Finnegans Wake, compare this to Woolf's dismissal based on snobbery and jealousy in her diaries), plus his Refutation of Time (which has won out in discussion of literature) over space is something to go back to. The range of reading on a level I have not seen since Auerbach's Mimesis (Auerbach ofc also published his own separate account of Dante) that feels like reading has taken place (unlike George Steiner lol, no name dropping). Both are as light and exhausting as they try to give as open a read as their faculties will allow them (at the edge!), and for the Borges there is no better demonstration of how a writer of fiction worth reading is always a reader first and foremost.

In the end its clear how I took Borges for granted too. I reckon Labyrinths is a possibly flawed collection. The power of the stories doesn't put the essays in perspective. Also brings to mind how people like Eco and Manguel really feel like bad copies of him. It can't be empahsized how much of a one-off Borges was.

I read Borges' essays and the fictions as essays, as banal as it sounds. The Whole of Harmonium, as it were.

*Borges' essays as fictions

Yes, for sure there is a relationship here between the stories and criticism. Nothing else like it.

Great post, xyzzzz

I am still ploughing my way through a big anthology of horror short stories called The Dark Descent, edited by David G Hartwell. As well as the expected big hitters (Lovecraft, Poe, King etc) the pick of the bunch so far would include 'The Swords' by Robert Aickman and 'Good Country People' by Flannery O'Connor (both dark comedies about sexual innocence yet utterly different in style and milieu), 'The Summer People' by Shirley Jackson, 'The Autopsy' by Michael Shea (a tremendously gory variant on The Thing), 'Sticks' by Karl Edward Wagner (which anticipates certain aspects of The Blair Witch Project before going full-on Lovecraft), 'My Dear Emily' by Joanna Russ and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which put me in mind a little of 'The White People' by Arthur Machen (who is strangely absent from this selection).

It also includes 'The Jolly Corner' by Henry James, which put me in mind of this comment from Borges - “I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James.”

I've never read Borges, but a lot of authors I like have been influenced by him. Where should I start?

Any of the famous stories. "The Library of Babel," "The Lottery in Babylon," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Aleph," many others. Most of his writings you can easily finish in half an hour or less.

Thanks!

I think the key to Borges is time. Each of those stories jmm mentions (or indeed the essays xyzzz mentions) took maybe 10 or 15 minutes to read but they've taken up huge spaces in my imagination - to the point where one reaches for Borgesian metaphors to explain the phenomenon.

There's an element of Kafka inventing his precursors here, but I do wonder if Borges is an inevitable literary archetype: just distant enough in time and place; the blandness of his biography that, alongside the impossible nature of his writing, that seems to invite mystery; adrift in the bowels of the national library, dreaming of gauchos, becoming that rare thing, the man who has read everything; the blindness in later life that he embraces, enabling the shift into the sightless sage.

His 'creation myth' is intriguing. Short version (as I remember it) is that he received a nasty concussion and was briefly hospitalised and during convalescence decided to start writing fiction, resulting in his most productive period. It'd make an interesting book alongside Dylan's crash, Eno getting run over by a taxi. I'm sure there's a bunch more.

Hi PBKR, you might dig these threads:
Borges translation?

Labyrinhts (1962) - Jorge Luis Borges POLL

My gateway/first love object: The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 (Dutton, 1978. ISBN 0-525-47539-7), translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, who is still my favorite for that, though Hurley and others I've read in comparison seem okay too.

I tried to get a start in Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion last night, but I couldn't get any traction with it. After watching that horrifying Trump/Biden 'debate' its tone of childlike innocence was a million miles from where my feelings were. I'll try again tonight.

So glad you liked the Rubáiyát essay. One of the most lovely little gems I've ever read.

I finished the collection of 2 Natalia Ginzburg novellas Valentino and Sagittarius. I thought they were pretty great. I will definitely be seeking out more of her books. It's hard to think of who to compare her to. For some reason, I thought of Collodi's Pinocchio. There is something like Collodi's fairy tale in the unity of effect, the excision of anything extraneous, in the way the comic and tragic run closely together, the treatment of her characters that borders on the malicious, though with an underlying sympathy -though nothing happens in these stories that couldn't happen in real life.

Now I'm reading True Grit by Charles Portis, which is a rollicking good time so far.

Great to hear all this Borges talk.

My gateway/first love object: The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969

Portuguese bookstore employee blogger I used to follow had a story abt someone coming in the store requesting "the ALF".

I finish Terry Eagleton's 'The Good-Natured Gael' at last. He praises Edmund Burke a bit more than I expected.

Then his essay on 'The Masochism of Thomas Moore'. Superb analysis: incredible that TE worked his way through the complete writings (and loads of criticism and scholarship) of this writer who he says at the end of the essay doesn't even stand up very well. TE's judgment of writers and their place in history is so consistently sound. But the attention to detail in these essays would be uncharacteristic of his later work.

Really enjoyed the Borges discussion, will track down 'The Aleph and Other Stories' (and I love the Labyrinths poll thread, ILB at its best)

Ward - that looks like an excellent comp. One aspect (of many) I neglected to emphasize is his love of fantastical literature (brings to mind his love of James, who seemed to be at ease with both fantasy and something more 'psychological'), something that I just don't read that much of these days. It might explain why he never won the Nobel prize too, its not their bag. Might be interesting to contrast his essay on The Detective Story with Auden's in The Dyer's Hand. For Auden iirc it seems to be something to relax with. For Borges, aspects of it appear every now and again in how he perceives the world of the page.

"I finished the collection of 2 Natalia Ginzburg novellas Valentino and Sagittarius. I thought they were pretty great. I will definitely be seeking out more of her books. It's hard to think of who to compare her to. For some reason, I thought of Collodi's Pinocchio."

Lol I love those Ginzburg novellas (read them in a past edition, one of NYRB's best reissues in the last year imo) but never thought of it along Pinocchio (which I have always meant to read ever since NYRB put out an edition of it).

NYRB are also putting out a couple more Ginzburg novellas next year.

Working through Norma Cole's "Mars" today. One of her books that isn't featured as heavily in her selected poems, I can understand why— it is strange and hermetic, in a sense, mixing prose and poetry and without standard reference points. I still find myself enjoying it, though, but as we've been discussing on the poetry thread, my tastes run pretty weird.

Sweet, that's my main thing these days, why I've gotten hooked on W.E.B. Bu Bois, who fearlessly ranges though forms, themes, data, imagery, whatever's right. New Sante book is said to do some of that as well.
Also v. interested in this, from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/when-a-virus-becomes-a-muse (shit title, but can see relevance in this essay):

The several dozen stories of “Written in Invisible Ink,” artfully translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, read like schoolyard confessions carved into a desk. Surveying Guibert’s work from 1975 to 1989, the book reveals a young writer confident in his themes yet restlessly experimental in expression. Realist vignettes alternate with fairy tales, ghost stories, and descriptions of imaginary erotic machines. In one story, a knife-thrower tricks the narrator into agreeing to perform as his partner (in drag); in another, a man steals a wax head of Jeanne d’Arc. The over-all impression is that of a writer in search of shapes for his unruly energy, as though picking through limbs in an anatomist’s workshop.
...Other, more sinister stories revolve around codependent relationships.
"A streak of cruelty" also noted, along w splatters of cold obscenity, but I say this is Teentown, buddy, and I consider myself warned.

Chronologically not all from Teentown, but he seems like the perpetual adolescent for quite a while in this saga.

The fantasy anthology Borges mentioned---I've got it, read from it sometimes, not something I wanted to plow straight through, as I do with everything else:

The Book of Fantasy Hardcover---November 1, 1988
Edited by
Jorge Luis Borges
Sivina Ocampo
A. Bioy Casares
Introduction by
Ursula K. Le Guin

From Publishers Weekly
Originally conceived of by its Argentinian editors in 1937, and now published in English for the first time, this unusual and provocative volume is an omnibus collection. In addition to stories by Ballard, Poe, Saki, Max Beerbohm, Ray Bradbury, May Sinclair, de Maupassant and Julio Cortazar, there are shorter pieces, anecdotes, folkloric fragments, dreamlike moments. Most of the 79 selections are only a paragraph or two long, giving us brief passage into magical visions of the world culled from the work of an international array of authors of the past three centuries, including less well-known authors such as Santiago Dabove, Edwin Morgan and Niu Chiao. The keynote tale may well be Borges's own "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in which an imaginary world, conjured up by manufactured documentation, ends up eroding our reality: reality is malleable, and imagination necessarily subverts and alters it.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Amazon purchaser Martin Chandler says:
This collection is excellent. Along with the deservedly famous selections such as The Monkey's Paw and The Man Who Liked Dickens, there are many stories even the most erudite fantasy reader may be unacquainted with. Some of the tales, such as The Story of the Foxes by Niu Chiao and the unsettling Guilty Eyes by Ah'med Ech Chiruani, are half page at most, but will implant themselves in the memory as effectively as the longer narrations. ("Guilty Eyes" is as durable as a poison oak seed.) Also present is a fine selection of Latin American fictions, with a focus on Argentine writers. Kafka' Josephine the Singer, Cocteau's The Look of Death, and Beerbohm's Enoch Soames sound straight out of the world of Borges, a tribute to the latter writer who managed to forge a world view at once deeply personal yet universal. Borges's own Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is included as well as a piece by the under-read Casares. All in all an indispensable collection, marred only by an astonishing number of typos. Buy it! (At 92 cents it's a steal.)
Haven't spotted any typos in mine, maybe it's a later or earlier printing.

"The Aleph" probably my favorite Borges.

It's a good one.

Doesn't that particular Borges anthology contain a little passage from Ulysses episode 9, about the definition of a ghost?

(Unless that's another anthology again, about ghosts, Gothic, or something.)

New month and time to trawl through 72 pages of Kindle monthly deal... Penguin Classics ghosts stories (in fact they had a few Halloweeny things) and the big Greek myths book by Graves were the only things that caught my eye.

Currently reading, very slowly, The Man Who Laughs. Has been two days and I'm still literally on page 1 because I keep falling asleep.

TE's long essay on Cork is incredible. The erudition, the detail, the obscurity, the humour.

I get on to the Father Prout business - Cork wits, pen-names, fake plagiarism. It's Flann O'Brien 100+ years early.

Where The Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens - Reading for a book club, and certainly wouldn't be otherwise, but it's pretty good? Great description of swampland, and a sort of Robinson Crusoe tale of an abandoned girl growing up alone. Uncomfortable with the portrayal of black characters - there solely to help the protagonist, overly angelic and while all characters speak in Southern US dialects whose authenticity I am no fit judge of, the black characters in particular sound a lot like black characters in a 1940's Hollywood film.

In my teen years I once read a guide to writing better fan fiction and one piece of advice that's stuck with me is to not impose your cultural tastes on your characters. Owens does this quite a lot, with the swamp rat characters getting into Edward Lear and other poetry.

Finished Norma Cole's 'Mars,' then finished Sophia Dahlin's 'Natch.' She's a young queer poet with a lot of talent, this book is hopefully a promise of many more good things to come...it is sensual, weird, and resistant toward any expectations. Great book, out from City Lights.

Now I'm onto 'October,' my first Mieville book. I'm excited so far...I think I've read more of the theory and speeches of Russian Revolutionary leaders than a history, and it's promising to deliver those lessons in a somewhat entertaining manner.

The only Mievelle I've read is The City and The City, a richly imagined and developmental urban and urban (alternating, hey it's cultural buddy, don't judge)thriller, also implicit satire (and homage, seems like, though I won't drop any names), very entertaining, though with a few moments of accidental comedy (the best kind), a few wobblers along the way, but well-worth a read if you end up liking October pretty well, and it does sound promising, his kind of material.

I have been reading Susanna Clarke's new novel Piranesi (I keep wanting to write Pirandello). I am in the second part, and so far everything remains very mysterious. Shades of Borges's "House of Asterion," perhaps also Wittgenstein's Mistress although I may be just thinking of the latter because I tried (and failed) to reread it earlier in lockdown.

going back to butler's wild seed, the ending of which i gave up on last year because i could tell it was gonna be depressing. but after having read two sebald novels i feel like i can handle it now.

Yes, I want to read Clarke's new one, and her others too, intriguing article about her life and works in recent New Yorker.
Butler is amazing, not that much like any other writer, in range, combination of elements, presentations. Doesn't always seem to work, at least expectations-wise, but yeah, worth going back in.
xxpost Natch sounds good, and as I said in response to your original description of Norma Cole's Mars, Sweet, that's my main thing these days, why I've gotten hooked on W.E.B. Bu Bois, who fearlessly ranges though forms, themes, data, imagery, whatever's right.----in the same vein, I've just finished my first reading of Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar, with a brief, incisive quote of De B. therein, and also ranges through various forms, themes, storylines, jumping back and forth, usually with good timing. He's mostly a playwright by trade, the kind who sits in the audience at many performances, and he's learned about attention spans.
The playwright skills bring fiction, memoir, essay through many voices within monologue---as with Dylan, this Pultizer Prize-winning creator->narrator drives fast cars, eats fast foods, contains multitudes, although his spill out, and at least for a while in here he'd rather take limos and eat and especially drink, also fuck, richly beyond dreeems---when he's traveling with a fan and mentor, a fellow Pakistani-American who has become a billionaire of debt.
This guy, who is also a or maybe the central character in one of Akhbar's plays, where he is deliberately presented in an ambiguous way, resulting in some confused responses, in reviews and post-performance Q&A: such confusion, among Muslims and non-Muslims, to this play and some (not all) others, is a big part of why this book is being written, this explanation given, says the narrator: it's all How We (Pakistani and American and others who are tagged as "Arab," among other things, who are natives, immigrants, sons and daughters of the pioneers, going back and forth and/or through one homeland and/or another when "homeland" is becoming and long since has become a common word) Got and Are Getting This Way. With a lot of dirty laundry aired, which some from the narrator's "background" find exhilarating---he's saying what they feel they can't say---others find it disconcerting for the same reason, or distorted in expression.
I haven't seen or read the plays, but having all this performed and extended on the page, through a fairly long, unpadded book, does give the individual audience member time and space to absorb, beyond the limits of stage performance, no matter how well-timed that may be. I do think that here, the billionaire of debt, still deliberately ambiguous, is also blurry, and mainly a subplot device, although it's a good subplot, and one that teaches the narrator things (De Niro: "I hear *things*") about himself and others. Although this also has to do with what I so far find to be the most limiting aspect of the essay/lecture turns, in what the Pakistani-American Citizen King of Debt (and another, better character, a Black Republican Billionaire who considers himself to be secretly gaming the System built on exploitation, expropriation and exclusion of the Other, thus confusing even the narrator), both of these legends in their own minds lecture the narrator, as he does us elsewhere, in terms which he finds revelatory, but I, probably like you and many of the author-narrator's fellow financial-political laymen will, find all of it---familiar, as far as it goes.
Still, he's a hell of a storyteller, yarnspinner, occasionally too gimmicky, even annoyingly so---yes you're a fascinating child, now run and get you parents, your other relatives back, now there are some characters omg
I think that if any of you think you might like this at all, you probably will.

WE also incl. non-"ethnic," also part of where the narrator is coming from, as an American-born son of medical professional immigrants, himself well-educated, nurtured in a leafy suburb of Milwaukee, one of the more traditionally liberal-to-grassroots-left parts of Wisconsin (though his father, secular and exasperated with Muslims who he sees as using the obvious downside of the System as an excuse, is also, has a secret life as a high roller, and for a while in the 90s, is a specialist called in to treat Trump---this professional-personal relationship is all in the first chapter though, mercifully enough).

non-"ethnic" also in that he grew up not wanting to see himself as so, like, brown in the kid mirror.

I didn’t like october. Surprisingly light on analysis and context until the epilogue. Really just: “and then what happened was...” for hundreds of pages. City and the city is great.

many xposts: i didnt know Clarke had a new book out, i will have to read that. I loved Jonathan Strange et al

I finished Toop's Ocean of Sound. It's brilliant albeit the further I got with it, I was surprised at an almost total lack of crisis in the text. Instead, it functions as a kind of gazetteer for a particular mode of exploring sound. It has led me back to a whole bunch of stuff: Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman, Thomas Koner.

Now reading Kay Jamison's Unquiet Mind.

That's a good one. What do you mean by "crisis"? A kind of gazeteer is what I expected. You mean not exploring tensions within and between musics, incl not enough saying "he fucks up here, but this part is better"? Which is what I always want.

Caek, not far in enough to agree with you, but I've read enough analysis of what happened...so the sort of 'and then what happened' historical side of it is appealing to me. He's also clearly a great stylist.

Mike Davis books can sometimes do the same thing that you're ascribing to October, and I love Davis.

Yeah I think it just wasn’t what I was looking for. Agreed he’s a good stylist. But I would put like Davis on another level of non fiction to october (haven’t read his new one yet)

Haven't read Davis' new one either. Already read Prisoners of the American Dream and Late Victorian Holocausts this year, so going to wait a minute before I get the new one. Late Victorian Holocausts did me in, it's the bleakest book I've ever read tbh

I have to give it up for just one more Homeland Elegies character: Asha, who is serially involved long-term with a crazy white guy, but the narrator is her sidepiece/has a relationship with her. She is complex, also complicated, but never scatterbrained: "I'm a lawyer, I can pick it apart," she says of the situation with her fortune teller: she's well aware of the angles, levels, shell games, all sides of the board, but the teller's told it right enough, often enough, including that she will meet someone with certain traits, and the narrator fills the bill, in her estimate--so, whatever the percentages of "suggestibility and coincidence," the process as a whole feels right so far.
That's just one example, and she affects the narrator in several important ways, more than he affects her, I think, and then she's on her way, no more downlow with him. I miss her.

In reply to a post a bit upthread:

I also read Where the Crawdads Sing for a book club, and was very much not a fan of the way she wrote the black characters, or of the way she uses accent to signal morality, so that the "bad" characters all speak in heavy hick accents regardless of their social status or level of education, while the "good" characters - including our entirely self-educated protagonist - sound like they're on NPR. The abusive dad has the heaviest accent/dialect, the unscrupulous rich kid has the second-heaviest, while the pure-hearted poor kid, the protagonist, and the protagonist's brother all speak standard English.

Huh, I hadn't noticed that, will look out for it. There's definitley a striver impulse in there, with the whole "ain't isn't a word" thing.

In response to your question, dow, it wasn't a criticism so much as an observation - that a book so concerned with the crossing of cultural and sonic boundaries doesn't discuss appropriation at any great depth. It is implied in the text, of course, and his open almost aphoristic style encourages conversation and engagement anyway.

No, I didn't take it as a complaint, but the xpost gazetteer approach can leave out a lot, you're right---good to know his style encourages response, not the lulling tourist ride etc. I haven't read it; my "That's a good one" was for Kay Redfield Jamison's remarkable An Unquiet Mind, a memoir in which (among other things, she doesn't have a one-track unquiet mind) the author outs herself as an example mentioned from case studies in Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression (there's a 2nd Edition, at least), which she wrote with Frederick K. Goodwin: massive and lucid, for laymen and professionals---pricey but worth it, I'm told, and second-hand copies online aren't rare (for whatever reasons).

Also wrote a book-length study of Robert Lowell, don't think I'm ready for that one.

I'm around 50 pages into An Unquiet Mind and so far it feels quite gentle - with intimations of the horror that is to come. She's painfully honest and clear-eyed and obviously focused on education. I've got a good medical library at my local university; I'll look those other texts up for sure.

Robert Lowell is the most overrated poet of the past 150 years, anyone who wrote a book-length tome on him and his work cannot be trusted afaic.

Maybe that's what she says?

I've looked at it a little bit: seems to be mostly examining, from extant evidence, incl. medical, and maybe police records/news coverage as well, also prob what Stafford and others wrote from experience, his bipolarity, and how it was treated, and how it may have affected his writing. Not a valentine.

I like Robert Lowell, but not sure there's any point in arguing about it.

Speaking of Lowell, I recently finished The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford and found it very fine. It is an oddment, in that it manages to smoothly combine a highly realistic and 'naturalistic' tone, while including a main character whose morbid eccentricity seems to challenge the very idea of what should be considered 'natural'. Yet, it all works and delivers on a level rarely touched so gracefully.

I also read the first Inspector Maigret novel by Georges Simenon, Pietr the Latvian, which had already achieved at least 90% of the fully-realized and mature Maigret series.

I like Robert Lowell, but not sure there's any point in arguing about it.

― o. nate, Tuesday, October 6, 2020 8:12 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

There's plenty of a point in arguing about it, since his racist, privileged bullshit continues to get a front seat from publishers and critics in this country. His work, along with others, continues to be pushed as a paragon of excellence when poetry as a whole has become more experimental AND inclusive, challenging ideas of the materiality of language and representation. On top of that, HIS POETRY SUCKS. It simply isn't very good, for the most part.

Don't get me started on Lowell and the confessionals.

Like, the connections between Lowell and CIA fronts are documented. His advocacy for a personal, confessional poetry opposed to the more political and anti-imperial poetry of groups like the Beats and those in the SF Renaissance is clear. He was a hawk and advocated for anti-communist ventures at home and abroad.

That racist, conservative trash like Lowell is remembered fondly, but poets like Baraka continue to be raked over the coals for various inflammatory statements is just one example of a wild double standard being applied when it comes to the political orientation of poets and poetry.

Robert Lowell is the most overrated poet of the past 150 years, anyone who wrote a book-length tome on him and his work cannot be trusted afaic.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table)

OTM. Lord, have I tried.

Every ten years a new edition or bio or something will emerge, but I get the sense Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill have (at last!) properly eclipsed Lowell.

I mean Bishop is only slightly better, IMHO, and I find Merrill to be utter pablum, but the latter is more about pure aesthetics and not about the manner in which aesthetics have been weaponized by the US government to nefarious ends.

Hard disagree! I find Merrill a total delight, especially now that I'm older and enjoy the complexity with which his mastery of meter and rhyme and rhythm complicated the relationships he limned.

Welp I like some of Lowell's poetry, in various modes, and always try not to let personal assholery get in the way of the song of the singer, the message of the bringer. Pound's remix of "The Waste Land" is still a keeper, at least as an antique template.; some of his St. Elizabeth's poens as well.
Jamison's book also seems to be a critque of Lowell's psychiatric treatment over the decades, a case as historical tracking device, as in Sylvia Nassar's A Beautiful Mind, which is a v. multi-dimensional life-and-times, much moreso than the movie duh

Certain poets -- Gluck, Jorie Graham, Lowell too -- I can only read their early work before their manner hardened.

Yeah, that's Eliot for me.
The St. E poems can be pretty affecting, as w some of Lowell's own selectivity, past the assholery for a moment.

I love Pound's translations and the pre-Mauberley stuff. I've tried Cantos so many times; they're proto-Google docs in which he cut and pasted musings, stray verse, quotes, and two thousand years of cultural detritus.

I don't really think that finding succor and intelligence in meter and rhyme and rhythm has anything to do with age. My most recent book is 498 interconnected haiku, and I list Hopkins and Donne's Holy Sonnets among my favorites.

I just find Merrill boring.

The Cantos are the only thing Pound wrote that are worth much imo

I love Pound's translations and the pre-Mauberley stuff. I've tried Cantos so many times; they're proto-Google docs in which he cut and pasted musings, stray verse, quotes, and two thousand years of cultural detritus. That's what I like, at least as a template! Also when Melville did it, also when he didn't do it too much.
Translations, as with editing, can bring out the best or better in both writers, for sure.
Yeah, that happens a lot in music too: the further back you go, the better the Residents get. Although with them in particular, you don't have to go back all that far, maybe the 80s

I don't really think that finding succor and intelligence in meter and rhyme and rhythm has anything to do with age

I didn't make a general statement -- I referred to myself.

You're coming off awfully aggressive today for some reason.

Everybody draws the line somewhere---I had my fill of Stanley Crouch's personality and literary persona long ago, can't read any of the tributes either. Bye schmuck.

Sorry Alfred! Not my intention, maybe a little keyed up by my absolute loathing for Lowell.

On the plus side, I get to record my lectures for ZZ Packer and Cather stories this afternoon, which should be a delight.

Right on! Love those two.

Really tho, I think that part of it is that there are certain poets, Lowell among them, who inspire an outsized level of dislike from me... partly because such poets have been allowed an outsized amount of space in literary conversation for the past six decades in the US. There arequite literally hundreds of other poets whose work and loves are more interesting. It just really grinds my gears in a way that many other things do not.

So, my apologies for coming off like a dick!

Whose work and lives, apologies

the manner in which aesthetics have been weaponized by the US government to nefarious ends

I honestly love the idea of the CIA having an operation to suborn prominent poets. Imagining Lowell getting involved in such a scheme doesn't really make him less interesting to me.

Perfect tweet

Want to know what's at stake this election? If we lose the Senate, socialist Bernie Sanders will become Budget Committee Chairman. If we hold the Senate, and I am re-elected, I will be Budget Committee Chairman.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 9, 2020

Ha wrong thread sorry. Still a good tweet.

Some cultural groups were infiltrated pretty well, others were indeed fronts, at least as far as leaders and/or founders were concerned. Also, there were assets, whom you might sometimes drink and talk with; a lot of writers like to do that. And the more a writer gets around, the more likely he (think it was usually a he) might be approached. Nowadays of course, you can just check their social media, with an algorithm or two, if you like.

the manner in which aesthetics have been weaponized by the US government to nefarious ends

I honestly love the idea of the CIA having an operation to suborn prominent poets. Imagining Lowell getting involved in such a scheme doesn't really make him less interesting to me.

― o. nate, Saturday, October 10, 2020 9:48 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This post makes me want to scream.

(not that there aren't still people in the field, on the ground.)

"I honestly love the idea that a genocidal agency of warfare utilized artists to further its cultural operations" is honestly an evil opinion, full stop.

Might be yanking your chain

Tbh I hope so!

This might be beyond the purposes of the thread, but the Cold War in part paid for the post-WWII cultural moment; it's complicated and dialectical. I wrote about it a few years ago after reading Frances Stonor Saunders’ remarkable The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letter.

Thanks, Alfred! That's been on my list, and your write-up is enticing. Have you read "Du Bois' Telegram" by Juliana Spahr? Some very dense chapters there about the US government's thwarting of radical Black artistic projects worldwide. Some juicy bits about Richard Wright in particular.

In any case, I'm reading more Norma Cole at the moment, 'Moira.' Excited to get back to it after some days away, off in the woods.

yes, that's terrific!

Call me crazy, but I think radical geopolitics is about the least interesting angle from which to read Lowell. I finished reading True Grit. I liked the first half better. It kind of turns into a more conventional western adventure, and the comic elements recede, but still a good yarn. Now I'm reading Marrow and Bone by Walter Kempowski. Originally published in 1992 in Germany, its about a young man, Jonathan Fabrizius, living in West Germany in 1989 who gets the chance to visit East Prussia (ie. western Poland), from which his family was forcibly displaced during the war. There are some parallels to American novels like Everything is Illuminated, ie a young person revisits the site of a family's historical trauma, and both novels go the unexpected route of playing the setup for comedy. Also it links of course to Kempowski's more recent novel All For Nothing which tells the tragic tale of an East Prussian family during the war that could almost be Fabrizius's.

The idea that the CIA orchestrates genocides isn't radical, it's fact, but whatever.

Also, reading Lowell is never interesting, that's part of my whole point-- it's the scribblings of a crazy, racist, rich white dude, propped up to seem interesting by a power structure that is invested in maintaining the status quo. Talk about agonies and quiddities of the ruling class.

I liked seeing Aimless's report on THE MOUNTAIN LION.

I'm now reading another book with 'mountain' in the title: Mountain City, Gregory Martin. It is non-fic and simply tells stories describing a hamlet of 33 people in remote northern Nevada, where the author has family history and grew up. It's a quiet book, but has real depth, too.

Next up is Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine A. Porter.

Gregory Martin? George Martin’s son?

I guess that Gregory Martin wrote a different book.

"Noon Wine" and the title story (which I reread when COVID started) are startling. Porter's been a huge influence on me since reading "Flowering Judas" in high school.

Christine falls. Enjoyable

about 2/3 of the way through Piranesi and it's gotten quite good, can't wait to finish (hopefully tonight after work)

Eula Bliss: On Immunity -- this is really good, as everyone else but me noticed in 2014.

Yeah it’s great. I have her next one in my library queue.

also belongs in Great Real Names (despite/extra-because *biss* no L)

I think I confuse here with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett

I have misread her name is Bliss the entire time, and not noticed until you told me that. The book's probably called On Invisibility for all my brain is capable of telling at this point.

this is a pretty good interview possibly of interest to users of the i love books message board, cc table is the table. the thumbnail bio at the start! i had no idea!

https://thelandmag.com/the-land-interview-mike-davis-jeff-weiss/

Thanks caek!

I had to quit the Kay Jamison. It's probably a false correlation but it was giving me supremely fucked up dreams.

Picking through the essays in The Good Immigrant now.

There is some kind weird voyeuristic thing about that KRJ books so that makes sense.

i just finished brideshead revisited. perhaps you've heard of it? big thumbs up for that one.

now reading sisters by daisy johnson. that's new this year. i enjoyed her previous (first) book, everything under, which was shortlisted for the booker a couple of years back (controversially IIUC since it was kind of genre).

still slogging away at riddley walker. very funny but only managing a couple of pages at a time.

That's it I think, James Redd - it's a window into psychosis and presented so matter-of-factly that it's often too much to bear.

Speaking of which, I read Riddley Walker last year, holed in up on Anglesey in a howling gale. It was perfect and traumatic all at the same time.

I had a friend who was a psychologist who saw at a convention or two and had a little crush on her or something- too much!

Yeah, she's been in panel discussions, Q&As etc..also one-to-one interviews on BookTV etc: v. cogent, cuet, charming, but not tooo charming

But yeah she's got the real talk; stay braced.

If you continue to know someone who has been quite plausibly diagnosed as bipolar, and even if they're doing well, reading her books can be the kind of experience which Willie Nelson compares to "Seeing your mother-in-law drivin' over a cliff in a Cadillac you ain't paid for: a combination of 'Right On!' and 'O Shit!'" The books can seem like an implicitly mixed, necessary blessing. And kind of enjoyable sometimes, like some (no no, not all) necessary evil.

i finished wild seed and mind of my mind by octavia butler. both good, interesting, entertaining. started clay's ark but it's not grabbing me. time to move on to something and someone else. i'm having a hard time finding that something / someone though. i feel like something current. flipped through the new hari kunzru book but i'm not sold, i just don't want to read about the gestapo right now after having read sebald. if someone wants to recommend something very *now* / *21st century* but not facile and not necessarily fiction please do.

Riddley Walker gets a lot easier, I don't know if there's a learning curve or what but the fist 60 pages or so took me weeks or even months to get through, and then i finished it off in a couple of days.

I attempted CM Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta a couple of years ago. That one never gets easier, the language is ridiculous. There was something densely atmospheric about it that made me want to keep at it - the combination of faux-King James English and exotic landscape is pretty singular- but i gave up in the end.

Binging on middle grade fiction at the moment and it suits my mental age and reading ability much better.
Bunnicula is the best thing ever, I am completely obsessed and might even read it again before Halloween. I tried the second book in the series but it's not even remotely in that league.
From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E Franweiler is my 2nd fave so far.

Bunnicula is brilliant, so happy that I got my daughter hooked on that and the Moomins.

Map, you might enjoy Karen Russell and Kelly Link's 21st Century speculative fiction, for lack of a better term, their short stories are imaginative and a lot of fun. Also, Russell is an empath; Link is punk. Maybe start w KR's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, KL's Get In Trouble Karen Joy Fowler started with science fiction per se, with stories in Asimov's, novels harder to classify. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has grown offspring dealing with wtf & aftermath of Primatologist Dad's bringing a new little sister home from the lab---there have been nonfictional accounts of this kind of experiment accumulating over the years, as one of the main characters discovers.

KELLY LINK! KELLY LINK! https://www.eddostern.com/RISD/Stone-Animals-by-Kelly-Link.pdf

I love her.

Finished my Norma Cole binge. Finding it hard to read any non-fiction atm, so have started the new Buffy Cain chapbook. will probably try to move toward actually reading non-fiction again next, though i might have to put down the Mieville— while I admire his style, the dryness of it all is really making it more of slog than i anticipated...

but actually, this gets into a question i have for all of you.

Do you have a reading "practice," so to speak? Do you take notes? What about routines?

I try to read poetry in the morning, as a way of waking up my brain and reminding myself of myself.

If I have time during the remainder of the day, I try to read non-fiction or philosophy, but sometimes— and especially as of late— I've had a more difficult time doing so.

Then at night, I go for either fiction or poetry, usually the latter since it's so much more my wheelhouse.

Today, I have to grade some papers, record the lectures for next week (on Dorothy Allison and Jayne Anne Phillips!), then plan the reading that I'm giving tomorrow. It's raining heavily. Think I'm all set!

I used to just read on public transport, in the Beforetimes. These days I alternate between reading prose and comics in the late afternoon and before bed.

I routinely alternate between binge-reading and avoiding books completely aside from the bare minimum for my work. The latter usually accompanies feelings of disgust towards academia and the hyperanalytic frame of mind It fosters, but I also go through periods where words strike me as the most unnecessary entities of all (cue Dave Gahan).

I also strive towards monogamy - hate that situation where I've got five different books on the go and feel like I'll never finish any of them.

Same here. I also wish I could abandon certain books more readily – those that 'fall from one's hands', as we say in French – but my completist instincts are too strong.

pom, I think that the disgust you talk about above is what really drove my decision to not get a PhD, tbh. Too many friends telling me that they hate reading and never have time for whimsy or reading "light" crap also helped.

I totally respect that tbh. I'm glad I went through with it in the end but part of that 'gladness' is just commitment to a sunk cost fallacy.

Should I bother with Seven Gothic Tales? The prose seems a bit much.

I read Dinesen when I was writing my thesis on Borges 17 lifetimes ago. I can't remember very much about it all except, as you say, that the prose was a bit much (I can do purple, I can do thickety but I don't know, it was a slog).

I find it increasingly difficult to read at home and always feel I should be doing something else. So, I only read in bed, usually non-fiction, particularly in term time.

She reminds me of the worst of Broch.

I think it's deliberately mannered? Not that that makes it any easier.

I read anecdotes of destiny, the one with “babette’s feast”, within the last few years & really enjoyed the style tho not many details have stuck

My reading habits aren't very fixed, but during quarantine I've often been reading philosophy during working hours on days when I have no work to do (philosophy feels like labour and so I feel less like I'm idling). Fantasy or sci-fi in the evening.

xps I wouldn’t like to be at all programmatic with my reading and I don’t have to so i don’t, I just read according to my whims and habits

I read on the bus to work, in the café at the weekend and increasingly during the evenings at home with music on since I never seem to feel like watching anything these days. Also I’d stopped reading in the break room at work cause I didn’t want to seem antisocial but am more willing to do it now that social distancing is mandatory, it feels like less of a faux pas when you have to sit at the other end of a long table.

I’m a terrible one for having a load of books on the go - usually for the sake of convenience, like I’ll start reading something on my tablet cause I forgot to put the book I’ve been reading in my bag, plus I’ll have a hardback book I only read in the evenings cause it’s literally impossible to carry around, and then I might also have an audiobook on the go, and a library hold becomes available so I start that... I have started reading a new book because the one I’m on is in a different part of the room and I can’t be arsed to go get it so pick up a closer one

Sorta relatedly, I just bought a fairly basic book stand thing in the hope of easing my neck problems and it is SO GOOD I’m honestly kind of annoyed I’ve gone 35 years without getting one of these, so I’m going to be reading a whole load of big hardbacks now just for the sheer novelty of it not feeling like torture lol. Currently making my way through Cynthia Ozick letters of intent, a 600pp career-spanning (and disappointingly typo-riddled) collection of her essays.

hard yes on Seven Gothic Tales, I reread it recently and it holds up beautifully

it helps to keep in mind that Blixen is a Dane writing English (very well indeed, but not exactly as a native speaker would) and also that almost all the stories are set in the early 19th century; both their style and subjects are of that period, but her irony lifts them above pastiche

Pretty good for a Baroness Karen

Map, you might enjoy Karen Russell and Kelly Link's 21st Century speculative fiction, for lack of a better term, their short stories are imaginative and a lot of fun. Also, Russell is an empath; Link is punk. Maybe start w KR's Vampires in the Lemon Grove, KL's Get In Trouble Karen Joy Fowler started with science fiction per se, with stories in Asimov's, novels harder to classify. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves has grown offspring dealing with wtf & aftermath of Primatologist Dad's bringing a new little sister home from the lab---there have been nonfictional accounts of this kind of experiment accumulating over the years, as one of the main characters discovers.

― dow, Friday, October 16, 2020 3:39 AM (seventeen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

thanks for these, will investigate

Bunnicula is great and also makes an easy Halloween costume; bunny ears, fangs and some white vegetables and you're good to go.

Deflatormouse, have you read The Mouse and His Child?

From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E Franweiler is my 2nd fave so far.

this book is wonderful. even being forced to read it in fifth grade and take a quiz after literally every chapter couldn't ruin it for me.

love the mouse and his child (and the frances books) but haven't yet gotten around to any of hoban's later books.

My brother and I got obsessed w/Hoban's books and read our way through most of them a few years ago. They're a mixed bag, but I think Riddley Walker and Turtle Diary are great. I also liked Pilgerman, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, The Medusa Frequency, and Kleinzeit, but how much you like those depends on how much tolerance you have for Hoban's particular brand of obsessive weirdness. (He's a bit like Philip K. Dick in that he has a few preoccupations that he returns to again and again, but instead of everything being about God, drugs and pottery, there's a recurring thing about the head of Orpheus, and another one about a Kraken, and a few others that are equally strange.)

Bunnicula is great and also makes an easy Halloween costume; bunny ears, fangs and some white vegetables and you're good to go.

― Lily Dale, Friday, October 16, 2020 5:40 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg LOVE IT!!! <3

I found a play version of this which calls for Harold and Chester to be played by actors in plain clothes, with only the occasional reminders in the dialog that they're animals which I think is so great, really spot on- they are effectively human characters. And Bunnicula is a stuffed toy.

I haven't read much of Hoban's kid lit. Riddley Walker was given to me by this girl in high school who I had a little platonic crush on. I'd mentioned to her that I was looking for stuff with unusual language, so she loaned me her favorite book. But I really struggled to make headway, I was embarrassed for her to know how long it was taking me so I returned it to her, fibbed about my progress and got my own copy. She was a couple of years older, kind of aloof and wrote such brilliant stuff. I was a little intimidated. So she says, "wow you finished it already?? it took me six months!!"

Around that same time I was over at a friend's house and happened to notice Hoban's name on a couple of his old kids' books, I think I found them kinda disappointing. Am I missing out?

Mixed up Files is wonderful, yeah. The children are a bit like Bunnicula's animals in that they don't seem to realize they're children. They have very adult personalities.

Also, Russell is an empath

What does this mean (this is not a trolling question, it's just I have only ever heard that term used, in SF books, as being likje a telepath but with emotions)?

I finished Pale Horse, Pale Rider last night. All three of the stories were fine pieces of work, but the final one from which the book takes its title was pretty goddamned amazing!

James, as my wife uses the term empath, it seems to apply to people whose empathy for the feelings of others rises to a level where it consistently interferes with their ability to stay grounded in their own feelings and not become overloaded with trying to soothe everyone else's fears, anxieties, griefs or worries. They have a hard time understanding and maintaining personal boundaries.

G.K. Chesterton - The Best of Father Brown
Adelbert Von Chamisso - Peter Schlemihl

Following on from Borges earlier in the month I went onto read these sets of fantastical-type tales. Think I'll get another selection of Father Borwn, lots I quite liked even if I couldn't keep the stories going in my head. Detective Fiction is just a very different mode for me.

I finished Pale Horse, Pale Rider last night. All three of the stories were fine pieces of work, but the final one from which the book takes its title was pretty goddamned amazing!

James, as my wife uses the term empath, it seems to apply to people whose empathy for the feelings of others rises to a level where it consistently interferes with their ability to stay grounded in their own feelings and not become overloaded with trying to soothe everyone else's fears, anxieties, griefs or worries. They have a hard time understanding and maintaining personal boundaries.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless),

She's fantastic, Porter is. I reread the title story at the start of the pandemic. Her Collected Stories is one of my touchstones.t

Ah, thanks, aimless, that makes sense.

Began The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins last night. Back on my non-fiction as a result-- engaging writing about a geopolitical moment of which I only know the basics.

I finished TE's essay on Cork and went on to his essay 'Home & Away'.

The level of obscure reading and learning in these two essays is staggering.

I meant it pretty close to the SF sense that James first mentioned: her narration tends to omniscience, but in a goood way--come along if you can, and you probably can (emotions don't interfere with narrative drive through layers of clarity, not in any stories I've read)(haven't checked the novel).

And speaking of clarity, Aimless, I meant "punk" in the attitudinal sense associated with a tag first applied, often as a compliment, by rock music writers to certain acts, especially bands, or groups, in the 1970s. Not in the older sense(s), such as most if not all definitions of "gunsel."

Sorry, too much coffee this morning, too much time with words this weekend (lost in productivity, now there's a word).

As of last night I am officially reading one of Dawn Powell's earliest novels, Dance Night, published in 1930. It has introduced so many different characters in the first few dozen pages that it seems destined to be a 'portrait of a small town' novel, rather than tracking a couple of main characters through their personal trials.

Nothing wrong with that, as long as I can actively keep all the names attached to the correct storylines in my memory. If I let several nights elapse between readings that can become unduly burdensome.

Phil Dellio, You Should've Heard Just What I Seen
L.C. Rosen, Camp
Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

i started the alex ross wagner book yesterday, had a discussion about it with my boyfriend last night that has sapped my enthusiasm about the subject and now i don't feel like going back to it. part of the issue is that while ross picks out details that feel immediate / relevant to now, i find the survey approach to be a little bland and the bits of his own thesis that have emerged so far are too general to be of interest to me. plus wagner himself does seem like a particularly vile and unlikable person with a bloated ego. on the other hand that can make for juicy reading...

i remembered a book that my ex had, the front runner, a big hit in the 70s about a track coach (ex marine naturally) and his love affair with one of his student athletes. not on kindle, unfortunately. said ex had this carefully curated collection of "power gay" books that he never read. i wouldn't mind breezing through something pulpy in that vein.

Is Alex Ross Wagner different from Alex Ross? Or a half brother fathered by RJ Wagner when he wasn't with Natalie Wood.

both are true, if you would like them to be. namaeste

Ann Quin - The Unmapped Country (Stories & Fragments)

Ripped through this in a day. A collection of never finished (she died by drowning), or stories that were in archives (sometimes personal ones, so its a great piece of labour by editor Jennfer Hodgson to track this stuff down). The title piece was shaping up to be an excellent novel set in a mental institution, with some juicy sketches with the therapist, fellow inmates and the like. Motherlogue is just as the title implies, and the other great piece is Nude and Seascape, which is a little bit like Mishima's Patriotism. This violent act which is carried out, a simple description of its physicality and sorta left there for you to go over. Its probably worth it for that piece alone.

Because I'm overdue for a Trollope novel, I started Barchester Towers yesterday. I usually read one of his every 15 months.

Absolutely loving "Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor" - it's exactly what I was looking for, which is a continuation of Love Goes to Buildings On Fire with a focus on rap, graffiti, art, etc.

xp I love Trollope, as you can probably tell from my username. Barchester Towers is probably the Barsetshire book I've spent the least amount of time with, but I love that whole series so much.

The Palliser series, which I finished over a couple years, brought great pleasure during Obama's presidency.

PBKR, if you didn't see my exclamations about that book and related on prev. WAYR?, there's a listening companion of the same title, released last year, put together by TL, who also therein comments on the tracks re New York Dance Floor historical context. Good related reading and listening can be found in the slipcase of The World of Keith Haring, also 2019, and released by Soul Jazz Records in time for a UK Haring exhibit.

You can also listen to (and order) the author's whole comp here, but his booklet isn't posted, oh well: https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-death-on-a-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983

Yes, thank you, I did on the Keith Haring thread where, I think, you and table is the table mentioned this book which is why I bought it. I've been listening to a playlist that has many of those tracks and more.

I read that book right after the Ghost Ship fire where I lost a bunch of people. It was a harrowing yet beautiful read for me, felt like therapy.

I know it delves into the early aids epidemic so I imagine things will get tough.

Have temporarily shelved Children of Men because I’m not reading that much atm and when I’m reading, it’s mostly the Invisibles ( see the comics board). It being October, I dipped into The Stepford Wives again and it’s so great, still! Moves along without a pause for breath or an inch of waste. I think I prefer the film’s ending for sheer creepy, but that’s my only criticism.

Last night at last I finished Terry Eagleton's long essay 'Home & Away', on the Irish novel.

I think this means that after many years, I have read the whole of his dense, detailed book CRAZY JOHN & THE BISHOP (1998).

I can no longer really remember whether I finished the long title essay, which is about Medieval theology. I think I did - long ago.

This is a remarkable book, so unlike much of TE's work in its extraordinary attention to obscure literary and scholarly details that most people don't know.

I have moved on to reread Elizabeth Bowen: THE LAST SEPTEMBER (1929).

jeez, I still need to get to her novels; The Collected Stories is catnip doorstop.

70pp into rereading THE LAST SEPTEMBER, I observe (perhaps again):

1: quality of the style - often surprising, estranging, perverse.

2: how pervasive the politics are - the sense of Ireland as an increasingly dangerous place is constant. Maybe it's 'background' yet so insistent as almost to be foreground.

3: the tartness of the social comedy - the way that, say, Livvy's sentiment about soldier beaux is disdained by Lois. Bowen doesn't really hold back on this. As with the politics, she goes for it more fully than I might have recalled.

The book maybe involves a certain structural irony, ie: 'silly comedy of country house manners' (unsure who would be the exemplar of this) is played out yet surrounded, threatened, undermined by really serious geopolitical / colonial struggle.

Saying that, though, I'm also mindful that a great many comedies of manners probably have something similar going on, ie: a sense of turbulent politics going on just beyond the walls, that relativise their perhaps trivial personal concerns. And eg: Virginia Woolf indulges in such upper-class silliness while also disdaining and satirising it. This combination of tones, from the comedy of manners to things that lie beyond its ken, seems the primary way that Bowen follows Woolf.

Several striking stories in and involving Ireland, especially the more priveleged Anglo-Irish ways of life(have read that one reason for so much writing, and some public speaking, I think, was for retention and upkeep of the ancestral property that she sprung from).
One involves a son of the lace curtain soil back for a visit from WWII London, the connection with which complicates how he now sees and is seen by these lofty social inverts even more; also there's now a girl, whom I think he only recalls as a small child, who wants to get out of this place, and he's wary as ever, kind of sympathetic in principle, but she seems like she might be as manipulative in her own way as the older people.
Another one is a kind of ghost story, seems like, in a vanishing way:I read it several times in a row, was more satisfied than frustrated by indeterminacy/indecision.
Think a lot of times, maybe always, she delves into "omniscient" narration as something that changes and is changed by and how and what and whom it regards.

privileged, sorry (also privillaged, in her A-I settings).

'by it regards"? Well yeah, changing.

i finished sisters by daisy johnson. a bit like early (good imo!) mcewan.

song of achilles by madeline miller. a modern prose novelization of the odyssey, which i read in an attempt to fill in the huge gap in my knowledge of the classics. very readable, certainly a ripping yarn, and now i know what people are talking about. if anyone can suggest anything else like this (prose, not poetry) then please do!

lanny by max porter. excellent. nominally literary horror i guess, but i read it for the Real England content.

having and being had by eula biss. i LOVED on immunity, and i smashed that hold button on the library website when i heard that the new one was about capitalism. but it's extremely slight, and really leans into the auto-non-fiction thing that on immunity hinted at, i.e. too many quotes and not enough interconnecting tissue.

i have now read (mostly listened to) 73 books this year.

Song of Achilles has got me excited to read more Greek myth based stuff. And there seems to be quite a bit about, mostly written by women, of the myths from a female perspective.

Penelopiad by m attwood
A thousand ships by Natalie Haynes
The silence of the girls by pat Barker
Circe by mm again
(There's a whole series of modernised YA retellings of the Odyssey by some bloke I can't remember the name of. Percy?)
And Stephen Fry's just-out third book of myths focuses on the Illiad.

Those are all Homeric stuff, and Natalie has also written the children of Jocasta which touches on Oedipus.

couple of other things. Natalie has a book out this year called Pandora's Jar, which is a long essay about how the myths have been treated over the years, specifically on how all the women have been mistreated

and this is natalie doing her trot through the illiad
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000d7p2
there are 6? series of these, i've listened to them all twice.

she's ex-standup comedian and did classics at cambridge so knows her stuff and how to present it

oh, Percy Jackson.

I haven't read much Jeanette Winterson, but in that vein I remember her "Weight", retelling the Atlas myth, was really good.

I got Pandora's Jar for my birthday, have yet to crack it open. Also a biography of Toussaint Louverture.

Just finished Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns and The Thing around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, very different but both eye-opening about female experience. I read Our Spoons came from Woolworths in about two hours since it's written in such a simple, almost child-like style, and because I wanted to rush past the increasingly horrific events as quickly as possible. It's set between the wars and the chapter about childbirth - shudders. The Thing around Your Neck is short stories about Nigerian or Nigerian-American women, and Adichie is a highly gifted storyteller.

I reread Carter Scholz's story 'The Amount to Carry'. Good conceit but now seems a bit heavy-handed, 2nd or 3rd time round.

I also reread some polemical prose by Mina Loy.

Over halfway through THE LAST SEPTEMBER: like many books it appeals more to me as it goes on. I like the character Marda who turns up 1/3 through. Again the sense of light satirical comedy is quite strong, alongside more serious elements. Which I suppose makes it an odd combination of tones.

ledge thank you!

(and of course song of achilles is a retelling of the illiad, not the odyssey, my bad)

Mary Renault's novels involving ancient Greeks are all historical, far as I know, but she can get way the hell back in there, like The Mask of Apollo.
If you did admit poetry, verses from Alice Oswald's Memorial: A Version of Homer's Illiad are looking pretty damn good to me in the August 24 New Yorker essay om her. Also what I've read from Anne Carson's translations of Sappho.

Mary Renault's novels involving ancient Greeks are all historical

The ones I've read are pretty good, but the amount of verifiable history that exists, upon which she builds her novels, is fairly scanty, thus requiring a fair amount of extra window dressing to fill them out. An alternative suggestion, equally historically-based and well-imagined, but less inclined to romanticing, would be Gore Vidal's Creation.

But for my money, if you want to know classics, read classics. Many of them are surprisingly ripping yarns. That's why they've survived so long. Only some of them are poetry.

I could wax on about quite a few page-turners, if anyone wants to hear.

i'll accept specific translations too! (i'll be listening to them as audiobooks if that makes a difference)

or Julian!

ledge thank you!

credit where it's due, i think you meant koogs!

ah yes! i do not recommend having kids during a pandemic. not good for sleep.

I have no idea which classics are available as audiobooks, how well done they are, or what listening to, say, Arrian's History of Alexander would feel like in terms of following the thread. Can't help you there.

One obstacle to absorbing an audio version of ancient history that I can think of right away is that all the place names are unfamiliar, since almost all of them have changed since ancient times. With a printed book you can flip to the handy map and figure out, for example, where the hell Bithynia is before continuing. I find it helps a lot.

my general rubric for audiobooks is: anything particularly poetic doesn't shine (although it's not necessarily a problem if it's read well), and i need a paper copy to make sense of anything with maps. (e.g. i'm going to do read "guns of august" soon, now that my $4 copy of that has arrived from thrift books.)

The ones I've read are pretty good, but the amount of verifiable history that exists, upon which she builds her novels, is fairly scanty, thus requiring a fair amount of extra window dressing to fill them out. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of with she can get way the hell back in there: she can turn the mists of history to creative advantage, I think, for instance, in The Mask of Apollo, life and works and times of an actor. All of hers are famous for gayness, which I guess was more library-acceptable/overlookable because of classy creative window treatment historicity.

Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian is accurately titled - a fictionalised memoir, definitely not a ripping yarn - but hugely impressive all the same.

There's also Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin, though I have to admit I didn't get very far in it as I found the style irritating. (Mostly I like Le Guin; this book just didn't do it for me.)

And Rosemary Sutcliff is brilliant, though her books are mostly YA, mostly about Roman Britain, so not retellings of the classics, and mostly about men. The Lantern Bearers is her masterpiece, I think.

Last night I finished Dance Night, Dawn Powell. Apparently, later in life she was heard to say it was the best among her novels. Authors are not the most reliable judge of such matters. It was hobbled by the limitations of her characters, which is really to say the limitations she placed on her conception of them, I'm guessing it was because they were based on real people she knew and she didn't sufficiently break free of the originals.

I'm pretty sure they were true portraits of the sorts of small town people she knew growing up, but in the end they couldn't uphold the amount of scrutiny she focused on them by putting them in a novel. They were rather small, most of them, and the one character who most repaid careful attention, the mother who owned the millinery shop, was left hanging as rather a cypher.

Powell did much better work later.

Circe was fun but ultimately not that satisfying for me. I did think it was interesting how there was essentially no character development, which I think was a choice to stay in line with Homer.

I finished Marrow and Bone, a nicely understated story about the fundamental hollowness of travel, the easy camaraderie that can form between traveling companions, which dissolves just as easily at journey's end, the pathos of missed connections, the meaning that inheres in a place, and what remains of the past. Now I'm reading a collection of William Faulkner short stories, which was recommended on this board as perhaps a less daunting way to approach the formidable oeuvre. Clearly Faulkner knows how to write a story, but there's something slightly clinical or field study-ish about the contrast between the elevated form and the lowly characters which I don't fully enjoy. Pity is an essential element of tragedy, but I think too often the characters lack the heroic element that would raise their sad stories to the level of tragedy. At least at this point I think I still prefer Flannery O'Connor's style of Southern Gothic, maybe its the mad fundamentalist fervor that lends her characters a slightly more heroic cast.

I absolutely love Faulkner. Even at his grimmest he can be absolutely lol funny.

I still dream of a ten episode prestige HBO version of As I Lay Dying. Social media would go nuts with that ending. That was my first Faulkner and still possibly my favorite.

There was a big film of it only a few years ago!

Directed by James Franco and starring Danny McBride! Holy shit! This can't be good. Also, how do you do that book in 2 hrs?

Yeah, ugh. My Mom used to show her classes a VHS of "Barn Burning," with Tommy Lee Jones as Flem Snopes, prob still worth a look on the 'Tube or wherever. Think it was from the old PBS series called something close to American Short Stories; like another one they watched, "A Rose For Emily," which is one of the selections that seemed less effective in The Portable William Faulkner, having to precede and follow some v. strong acts. That's a good doorstop even if you know some of the material: for one thing, it puts stories and chapters from the Saga in chronological order, from the early 1800s (incl. Indians calmly tracking their black runaway slave) to the early 1950s. I think the edition I read was expanded a bit, but no filler (which he admitted he did write, paying bills etc.)

Well there are a couple more weak spots, maybe too slick, too impulsive, but it must be hard, also nice, when you know whichever they will publish anything with your name on it.

But even that stuff has his voice, of course.

I was in a play adaptation of a number of Faulkner's stories when I was a freshman in college. It was some student's senior project, and wasn't terribly good, but I do remember re-reading TSatF and AILD and enjoying myself much more than I did when I read them in high school.

Still working on 'The Jakarta Method,' which remains just unbelievably brutal history to be honest.

In the meantime, tho, I've also read Amandine André's 'Some Thing' chapbook, which was translated from the French by a friend of mine, and it is really stunning stuff. Blanchot meets Bachmann meets the Montreal feminists. Also re-read Barbara Guest's 'The Türler Losses,' her weirdest book, and enjoyed myself immensely.

I mean AILD is hysterical. SPOILERS, but there are multiple scenes that play out like a teen sex or gross-out comedy (Dewey Dell trying to get the abortion, them setting Cash's leg with fucking cement, come to mind). In addition they are absolutely horrifying and tragic as well. Then the story literally ends on a (gut) punchline. As a humorist, Faulkner was an SOB.

I read Dhanveer Brar's monograph on Dean Blunt. It casts Blunt (primarily through a listening to '“BBF” Hosted by DJ Escrow') as an avatar of dissent, a continuation of various voices, from Beefy (from Babylon), through Kwesi to AR Kane. It sent me back to the music, as all good music writing should.

Now reading Roadside Picnic. It might just be the translation but as much as I love the premise, the hardbitten noir of the narrative voice is leaving me a little cold.

That should have said that Brar places Blunt's work as part a continuum, critiquing Britishness and the exclusion of certain voices.

Peckinpah directed Porter's "Noon Wine"

Wow, forgot about the series he did that for, after the heyday of anthology TV (the later series that Mom got those Faulkners from was on PBS, mostly or all in the 80s, I think):
Five years after the final broadcast of CBS’ Playhouse 90 symbolically signaled the end of the “golden age of television,” ABC-TV announced plans for an ambitious new anthology, Stage 67, with an eclectic single-season slate of twenty-six programs across genres.
promising description---now I think I'm remembering an image from it---the original AMC sometimes showed prestige items from 50s-60s TV, so maybe I saw it there:
https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2013-03-23/abc-stage-67-noon-wine-abc-112366-human-voice-abc-5467
Getting more strictly thread-relevant, I intend to soon read at least some of Porter's Collected Stories.

Oops, Tommy Lee Jones, played Ab, not Flem, sorry. This is the series, also incl. Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." (I remember several of these, like "The Blue Hotel" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" and "Paul's Case" and "I'm a Fool," but must have flushed all memories of Henry Fonda in so many of these, jeez, never did like him much in anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Short_Story

incl. Indians calmly tracking their black runaway slave

That story is in the collection I'm reading. It's a ripsnorting tale, I could imagine it directed by Quentin Tarantino, though I'm not sure even he would have the balls to tempt the gods of cancel culture that much. Faulkner's depictions of native Americans tend to border on caricature, but I guess that was not unusual for the time.

recently finished The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. the immediately striking things about it are the futurist Thai and bioengineered setting, which is by far the biggest success of the book:

Around him, the market soi bustles with Bangkok’s morning shoppers. Mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-fin plaa. Overhead, palm-oil polymer tarps sag under the blast furnace heat of the tropic sun, shading the market with hand-painted images of clipper ship trading companies and the face of the revered Child Queen. A man jostles past, holding vermilion-combed chickens high as they flap and squawk outrage on their way to slaughter, and women in brightly colored pha sin bargain and smile with the vendors, driving down the price of pirated U-Tex rice and new-variant tomatoes.

i got somewhat bored about half way through, and when i started thinking about putting my thoughts down here, that was going to be my takeaway; it struggles with propulsion. this got me thinking about one of the propulsive elements of some science-fiction, which is to say the mechanics behind unfamiliar language, images and behaviour get revealed through the course of the book. that never really happens here, there are all sorts of phenomena left unexplained. equally, any plot there is never really coheres as such.

and herein lies something of its... interest? charm? basically the story is one of several quite differently motivated, historied and not unequivocally sympathetic characters, within a city and state zone, beyond and within whose boundaries is looming destructive threat. That threat - effectively of non-state agrifood industrial actors – has many vectors. Characters are all making plans, which never come to fruition, actions are regularly made on the basis of error or misinterpreted information, nothing tends towards any form of completion, and the scenes of coup and urban collapse, are the natural completion of a set of hidden

i don't think this is always enormously *good* or entirely satisfactory as such, but it is interesting, and it's interesting also to read how the author really struggled with direction, themes, closure, arc etc - all that is fairly evident - I'm pretty certain it was the ultimate source of my boredom and sense of lack of movement and shape - but it does result in a quite unusual book.

So once I sat down to think about it, i ended up being rather more intrigued and satisfied by my reading of it than i necessarily was when I put the book down.

Have you read Mieville's The City and The City? Some stumbles, but a good-faith urban and urban interzone multi-cultural thriller/procedural (doesn't let the conceptually layered settings or the plot get in each other's way, or not too much).

For the most part, they advance each other.

I finished Jenny Offill's hilarious Lydia Davis-indebted Dept. of Speculation. I started my first Stefan Zweig, Burning Secret.

I auditioned a few moderately demanding books to see if they met my mood, but it turns out my mood is for something utterly plain, neutral and emotionally undemanding. Therefore I'll be reading Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, Michael Ruhlman.

xp I think that was my first Zweig as well (it leads the collection of his novellas published a few years ago), and if I'm not mistaken I devoured it in a single sitting -- though I didn't exactly love it, and I have trouble recalling anything at all about it now beyond a vague sense of the setting.

On the other hand, Chess Story -- which I approached somewhat warily, not being a chess player -- haunts me.

Was somewhat lit up last night and got deeply into the first few sections of Jean-Luc Nancy's 'Being Singular Plural.'

Have you read Mieville's _The City and The City_? Some stumbles, but a good-faith urban and urban interzone multi-cultural thriller/procedural (doesn't let the conceptually layered settings or the plot get in each other's way, or not too much).

I met him once. He said he didn't like THE DARK KNIGHT because it endorsed a fascist Batman.

He hadn't actually seen the film.

I didn't really like The City and The City when I read it, but it's grown in my imagination. I love the concept. Perdido Street Station is immense.

I loved the Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. It was all about the concept for me but the last 80 pages or so were finely written and constructed. I wanted more of the Zone (which is clearly part of the point: it is a motor of pure Desire after all).

I've started a collection of Nina Coltart's essays on psychoanalysis.

If you have the inclination, Fizzles, I'm intrigued by the idea of Miéville not 'listening to anything he says'...

75% through THE LAST SEPTEMBER. Much that's compelling about this novel, even as it dallies so blatantly in frivolity (that is, country-house manners and trivial upper-class talk).

I come back to the fact that the novel seems to hold together (or hold apart) two things: the frivolous or decadent social world (even whirl), and the menace of the War of Independence. It keeps both in mind throughout, even though most of the time it's only the former wondering about the latter. I suppose I'm impressed by a novel that can do the frivolity so naturally, while also being, in a way, politically and historically serious.

If you have the inclination, Fizzles, I'm intrigued by the idea of Miéville not 'listening to anything he says'...

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, 31 October 2020 11:05 bookmarkflaglink

i feel i just shouldn't talk about him, because people like his books, and i kind of feel i *should* like them, which makes me feel and act a bit jilted when i don't. hence my incoherence itt and also in the mieville thread (i will not be taking any questions on the statement 'can't creatively imagine for toffee'):

Is English not his first language?

Certain they're dictated. Some sentences in whatever that one I read before were just unbelievable, impossible to write for anyone from primary school level up (not even necessarily bad writing as such, just 'how could you write those words down next to each other? It was some sort of 'had, had had clusterfuck I think). I've read two of his now - The City and the City and that one... hang on, oh god - Embassytown, that was it. He's becoming a real grudge read. The thing is I want him to succeed at what he does - his approach appeals - but I swear he can't write or creatively imagine for toffee.

Feel I must be RONG about some stuff tho, cos plenty of clearly more or less good/sensible people like him. Feel slightly embattled and defensive about my dislike. Makes me touchy and incoherent about him.

― If you live in Thanet and fancy doing some creative knitting (Fizzles), Thursday, 5 July 2012 18:11 bookmarkflaglink

Going to finish The Jakarta Method today. While it has some minor structural issues, I believe that it should be taught in every high school in the US.

Fair enough, Fizzles - sometimes you have to trust your instincts with writers eh.

I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar but with reservations with the latter (it collapsed under its own weight). The City and The City was conceptually glorious but clumsy at a plot and character level. I think the best thing I've read is a short story about disappearing streets in London, which is pure Borges and again, a lovely concept.

Fizzles: probably neither of us truly knows, but I would it is very, very unlikely that CM dictates his novels to a person who transcribes them (if that's what you meant).

[I would *say]

Fizzles: probably neither of us truly knows, but I would it is very, very unlikely that CM dictates his novels to a person who transcribes them (if that's what you meant).

So we'll put him on the list with R023rT Lxw*l% and my contribution:
Everybody draws the line somewhere---I had my fill of Stanley Crouch's personality and literary persona long ago, can't read any of the tributes either. Bye schmuck.

― dow, Saturday, October 10, 2020
Who else pushes your button ppl? Don't be shy.

Shut up and play your drums, Crouch.

Croz you know they got a hell of a band.

i liked perdido street station but also have no inclination to ever read anything else by him

i didn't like city and the city at all but embassytown and iron council are both excellent. he's pretty good at the idea-and-system part but a dire stylist. also his cornball borges devotion is detrimental to his work and kinda weird for a supposed leftist.

The one Mieville I tried - Kraken - was so pisspoor (like, sub-Pratchett pisspoor) that I haven't ventured further, though I understand that one is something of an outlier among his novels.

I have thoroughly given up on October, btw. Dry dry dry dry dry.

My book about grocery stores is predictably mediocre. The author appears to have sold the idea to his publisher, got a green light, then found out the subject matter was not only vast, but complex in its details, and that narrower segments of the subject had been covered in depth by better-focused books. But, since he had a contract and had fucked around for several years gathering material, he went ahead and wrote a scattershot, thinly researched book and handed it over.

Still, this book is about my speed until the election is clearly decided, which I fervently hope is long before the end of November. In 2000 it dragged on into December.

Yeah, narrower deeper coverage would def work better for that subject. I once saw C-Span testimony to a Congressional (sub?)committee about the personal experiences of those who pay for placement on shelves: one guy was covering a store (or department?) manager's child support and alimony for a while---but products can get shoved behind others anyway, or no longer displayed at all, for whatever reason: none of this was illegal, then or now either, probably; I haven't heard of any changes.
Music biz permutations too much for this thread, but I'm told that Frederick Dannen's Hit Men is a good read.

I have thoroughly given up on October, btw. Dry dry dry dry dry.

You did! And I thought I could plough through. Maybe another time! Will keep it on the unread shelves

I think I actually prefer the less typically Faulknerian, perhaps more commercial, stories from this Faulkner story collection to the Yoknaphatawpa county (sp?) stories that are often cited. They're just more fun. He had good range, and was competing against some very strong talent during the golden age of the commercial short story, at least in this country. The guy wrote a lot of books, I'm curious about all the less famous, post-Nobel novels.

You might like The Reivers. I did, but read it a long long time ago, and lingering impressions may be mixed with those of the movie---wiki article may eventually have spoilers, but here's the basic take:
he Reivers: A Reminiscence, published in 1962, is the last novel by the American author William Faulkner. The bestselling novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. Faulkner previously won this award for his book A Fable, making him one of only four authors to be awarded it more than once. Unlike many of his earlier works, it is a straightforward narration and eschews the complicated literary techniques of his more well known works. It is a picaresque novel, and as such may seem uncharacteristically lighthearted given its subject matter. For these reasons, The Reivers is often ignored by Faulkner scholars or dismissed as a lesser work.

~Hi~

JUST FINISHED:
Moscow to the End of the Line - Venedikt Erofeev: A great movie has yet to be made from this book. I straight adaptation with no cuts would be phenomenal cinema. I never drink spirits, but I did buy a bottle of vodka to take me along the journey with Venya.
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy: First McCarthy book. A bloody trip.
The Crucifixion - Fleming Rutledge: An unusual companion piece to Blood Meridian (actually, chronologically it was the other way around). Great book to kick the sunshiny new-agy optimism out of Christianity

Currently Reading:
I Am a Cat - Natsume Sōseki: Started this years ago. Picking up two kittens brothers in a week, seems like the best study prep for a new stage in life.
Being and Time - Martin Heidegger: This book is surprisingly mellowing me out. A very heavy dose of "what will be will be" in the heart of Heidegger's thought. A good dose of sovereignty for a crazy year.

Recently read 2 miserable bastard French novels back-to-back: Journey to the End of the Night and Atomised. I liked them, but their misanthropy rubbed off on me a little too much and put me in a foul mood for the few weeks I was reading them. Now reading Vineland. It feels like a welcome change of tone in comparison. I know it's considered lesser Pynchon, but I'm having fun with it so far. Not looking forward to the day when I have no new (to me) Pynchon to read. Saving the biggest ones for last with Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.

Began Nicole Brossard's 'Picture Theory' this morning, for the second time.. found myself entering it from a different perspective and being able to adjust to its oddness a lot more readily.

I can't imagine reading Céline right now. Or Heidegger for that matter.

I've resumed reading Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. I can't remember why but I put it down six months ago. I need the escape into the frozen north, even if it is littered with the bodies of muskoxen and Beluga whales.

You might like The Reivers

That one looks interesting. I'm also curious about "A Fable" a late novel set in the trenches of WWI. I liked the war stories by him I've read.

kind of an odd reading time for me -- i'm finding it hard to stick with anything. i did reread mary shelley's frankenstein for the first time since my teens. went right through it in a few nights. it's a very strange book, especially the periodic long stretches where victor f. just goes on vacation and describes the pretty scenery at length and seems to forget all about the terrifying results of his mad experiment, and this seems to happen for months and even years at a time. still pretty good, though! kinda tempted to look at some of shelley's other novels, which i know nothing about.

I really enjoyed The Last Man In Europe which starts as this big bustling future-historical steampunk pageant, romance and intrigue rippling into bloodwaves ov battle---then gradually it becomes like it says in the title and like what you're describing (which I won't spoil) Also liked a collection of shorter fiction, blanking on title, think it's from University of Nebraska Press. There's also this novella about a girl, maybe too smart for her own good, also in fraught relationship w her likewise father--kindle only, last time I checked, bundled with a story by her mother----here tis as stand-alone now (along w a whole lot more Mary now in the Kindle Store, which I hadn't seen all that):
...-unlike her first book, Frankenstein, written a year earlier, Mathilda uses fantasy to study a far more personal reality. It tells the story of a young woman whose mother died in her childbirth--just as Shelly's own mother died after hers--and whose relationship with her bereaved father becomes sexually charged as he conflates her with his lost wife, while she becomes involved with a handsome poet. Yet despite characters clearly based on herself, her father, and her husband, the narrator's emotional and relentlessly self-examining voice lifts the story beyond autobiographical resonance into something more transcendent: a driven tale of a brave woman's search for love, atonement, and redemption. It took more than a century before the manuscript Mary Shelley gave her father was rediscovered.
The stories tend to try to be more normwave Golden Age Victorian ladies' fiction, but still her, still pretty powerful in their way, best I remember.
Haven't read any other novels.

Might get around to this one:
THE FORTUNES OF PERKIN WARBECK is an historical novel concerning the life and exploits of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne of King Henry VII. In the novel, Warbeck claims to be Richard, Duke of York, the second son of King Edward IV who was unjustly imprisoned in the Tower of London.

The sections where he's chasing the monster around the Arctic are permanently embedded in my brain, God I love that book.

J.D., I agree, from (long-ago) memory that FRANKENSTEIN is not very much what one would expect it to be.

I started rereading Nella Larsen's PASSING.

been really enjoying janet malcolm’s the silent woman: sylvia plath and ted hughes. this in some senses is surprising, because i have never really had any interest in either (which is bad and incurious of me, tho i give myself more of a free pass in the case of hughes, whose poetry i’ve never been much taken with).

but this is a great and incisive description of among other things, the psychic challenges of biography, the relationship of the living to the dead, what it meant to be an american woman in the UK, depression, and the horrid escapes and traps of the self-defined romantic artist, and contains a truly malignant anti-creative character/force in the form of Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister.

A+ one of the best books i’ve read this year. a keeper.

does also make me want to revisit *some* of hughes’ poetry, and give plath another go.

loved that book despite also having little-to-no interest in its subjects

oh cool!

i was just thinking as well as this:

the relationship of the living to the dead

it’s really good on the relationships of those people whose point of connection is some who’s died, traumatically in this case.

Plath is I suppose a cliché for young women to like but I loved her work a lot when I was much younger and I still like how she wrote, the clarity and frankness of her expression really gets to me. This has also reminded me that I lent a collection of her poems to someone I subsequently fell out catastrophically with, so time to reorder it I think.

Also now remembering that Plath was so beloved by my English class that Ted Hughes was a boo-hiss total hate figure, lol.

t’s really good on the relationships of those people whose point of connection is some who’s died, traumatically in this case. Thanks, Fizzles! Just realize this is what I was trying to pinpoint re Cather's The Professor's House, which I raved about on prev. WAYR? Most of those characters are in the same family, but their relationship to dead guy x his legacy is becoming key, esp. in POV of the Professor.
Have only read a little of The Bell Jar, need to get back to that, and got why it would be such a YA fave of girls, also the poetry can still startle, while going toward xpost romantic traps, and must have inspired many many song lyrics. Also enjoyed & need to get back to emerging diaries and letters over the years.
The only thing like an extended biographical account that I've read is by her colleague and neighbor A. Alvarez, in his book about suicide, The Savage God.

practicing self-care by reading uncle fred in the springtime by pg wodehouse

Started reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang, a collection of short stories of which I'd already read The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which was good. First story, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is good, but it's in close enough proximity to Borges to feel a bit 'miss is as good as a mile.'

Also in my pile, Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, which looks good, but no book has tried harder with its blurb quotes to make me never want to read it: 'A Zingy Romp' Guardian, 'A Mind-Bending Romp' NYT, 'Rollicking' (that from Maggie Nelson, so we'll call that a score-draw). 'A bawdy, dazzling triumph of a book' etc.

Seriously. do not use the word romp plz. It puts me off my tea.

I've always loved THE BELL JAR (and said so at length in an article that was never published) but clarity is what I've rarely found in Plath's poetry (save the most famous and broad-brush pieces). I wonder if, though she was young when she wrote it, I was never old enough to understand it when I read it, and could do better now.

romp is a horrible word

The only thing like an extended biographical account that I've read is by her colleague and neighbor A. Alvarez, in his book about suicide, The Savage God.

― dow,

Janet Malcom's The Silent Woman is terrific.

I used to bullseye romp wats in my T-16 back home

Luc Sante's new Maybe The People Could Be The Times is proving to be quite the variegated unity, but I want to peel away some of the framework from an early segment, "E.S.P.":
1.
Very late that night, riding home on the train as it shoots past the graffiti-washed vacant stations on the local track, they stare straight ahead, unable to explain or articulate the sense of dread that fills them both except by reference to the lateness of the hour, or the ebbing of the drugs, or the onset of a cold.
....The air is heavy with the weight of an earlier week, it was still summer in the streets above...The song is "Florence, " by the Paragons.
....The song wants to be a ballad but keeps turning into a dirge...But then doo-wop is a spectral genre. It actually happened on street corners; what transpired in the recording studio, afterward, might sound posthumous.
...But "Florence" cuts through the format with its breathtaking weirdness. The piano, the groans, the keening falsetto..."Oh, FLorence, you're an angel, from a world up above," raves the singer in a dog-whistle register that symbolically indicated the purity and intensity of his passion, while an Artic Wind blows through any room where the song is played.
Naturally our couple don't know that each has "Florence" playing on the internal soundtrack, not that either would be surprised. The hour, the chill, the sticky yellow light, the vertical plunge from a high---all call down "Florence." The moment could feel merely depressed, small-time, pathetic, but "Florence" in its strangeness lends it magnificence. "Florence" places the moment in the corridor of history, makes it an episode, emphasizes its proximity to heartbreak, suggests that a contrasting scene will follow directly.
(A lot of stuff happens, mostly to and in other people, but) ...Now they've stopped talking, from fatigue and futility. They're drained, and that in concert with the cold air makes them feel as though they're drifting, carried by breezes far from their rooftop amd over the city...They sit, or float, atop a dead city, mired in a darkness that does not even manage to be satisfyingly black. Just then the sun's first rays point up over the horizon...Silently they regard this phenomenon. It seems cruelly and pointlessly ill-timed, purely gratuitous and designed to mock them. It is the earth epic ritual enactment of beginning, and they are at an end. They become aware once again of the song, hovering over the rooftops, emanating from some unseen radio. Sally goes round the roses and keeps going round them: it is a circle. It has no point of entry or exit. They have no purchase on it, no more than they have power over the sun.
Not quite the ending, but close enough.

(Some typos in there, sorry: it's "Arctic wind," not "Wind," a few things like that.)

"the earth's," not "the earth"---shit, I shouldn't have taken this out of context; just try reading the whole thing.

Recurring segments of non-linear groove: a nine-year-old Belgian transplant to a "leafy suburb" in New Jersey tries to understand Americans, with words in print as primary sources---authorities examine a picture he draws of his mother in the supermarket, which mostly displays a variant of the common immigrant response to our abundance ((known to result in "eighteen types of aphasia", for instance): here, gigantic bags are labelled "Chock o' Full Nuts" and so on---also, re: the monster "Tetley's," subject, native of coffee-drinking nation, has been heard to s"ay that family-size teabags look like "pants on a hanger." Fascination with said abundance "may result in his working three jobs---or may lead to a series of service station robberies; however, deportation is not currently recommended."
(A later drawing involves a very groovy Catholic-Aztec-Atlantean temple with a welcoming mouth; this illustrates a natural history lesson: "The stoner, like the grasshopper, is on drugs.")
he also tries and fails, always to get five bucks from the Reader's Digest for his jokes, but this teaches him a lot about humor (for inst. while once again comparing his offering with those accepted). He doesn't joke outright in writing so much as slip a phrase in while carefully moving his flashlight over the latest goods (though my sense of his voice comes from as many years of correspondence as print).
Gets a scholarship to a Jesuit-run day school in Manhattan, commutes, cuts classes, but even when he doesn't, gets an earful of the sound of the city, incl. music as structure, as much or more than texture. But it's not enough: gobbles up every mention of bands etc. in the underground papers he reads on the train home, knowing he can't take them there; Mom searches his room too well. The papers also incl. advice on cheap medical care, housing, food, which are not what he neeeds. Later, living on the Lower East Side and CBGB yadda yadda yadda, the hip papers are full of musical superfluity, and not the food etc. low-downs he needs.
Great descriptions of music in life and vice-versa, incl. the kind that drives your girlfriend to drive your dancing beyond any skinny boy endurance, though not finesse, but hey.
There are also segments of lifelines to the end etc.

Pinefox, I remember the Larsen only vaguely since I haven't read it in 20 years, but I remember it staying with me at the time. There's something strange and woozy about Larsen's style that I adored, at least in my memory of reading it

I picked up Fong and the Indians, Paul Theroux. It dates from 1968, so I think it was his first published novel, set in East Africa of the mid-1960s. It aims at humor and sometimes it delivers humor, but it relies a lot on racial and cultural stereotyping for that humor, so I'm not going to recommend it to other ILBers. It's OK to let this one sink into deserved obscurity.

Xxp Maybe the People Could Be The Times is the first part of the Love song title Between Clark and Hillsdale is that significant?

David Olusoga The World's War.
Book on the unsung input of ethnic populations across the globe in the first World War. I think this covers both coloured soldiers from the then empires of various nations involved and fighting in non Western European fronts.
I had attended a webinar on a similar subject a few days before finding the book on a shelf in the sale section of a local chain newsagent.& then left it on the shelf as I went around shopping but went back for it that day instead of leaving it til my next trip. Now glad I went back for it then since can't get into shop during lockdown.

Dipping onto way too many other things. Just read Ned Ragget's piece on MBV'S Loveless in the book Marooned that turned up as I tidied piles of stuff beside my bed.

I finished the collection of Faulkner stories (the Modern Library one to be precise) and now I've started on Nell Zink's Doxology. I believe Scott S. was praising it somewhere on this board. I'm digging it so far, definitely hitting my Gen-X nostalgia vibes hard.

Part III of xpost Sante's Maybe The People Could Be The Times (right, Stevolende, he thanks RIP Arthur Lee for the title, the point of which becomes easier to sense) is a sequence of profiles->critical essays->narratives, a sequence with its own overall narrative continuity, its own thematic thought train, linking all the profiles etc, but not too tightly.
"The Source (Barbara Epstein)" is about the editor who made a writer out of him, when he was mainly drinking and working-lurking in the NYRB mail room. She (this is my way of looking at it) set him free, as something of her own creative shaping, that way that editing and writing merge and recombine---though I'm thinking this way after the next stop, "The Freelancer (Richard Stark)": Stark himself is a kind of offshoot of his creator/main ID, Donald Westlake, who gives Stark license to single-mindedly pursue the pursuits of a crook, a total, self-taught and self-disciplined pro, himself a kind of writer, in Sante's take, because the pro crook must always size up, trace, track "only connect" all the factors of the next heist, incl. character studies of his accomplices---but something always goes wrong, people and things never stay under his thumb (if they did, it would be tough-guy cozies, the more mechanical caper tales of the 60s etc.)

(Jumping ahead to his Simenon piece, Maigret's Memoirs has the cop obv. flattered by the usual author's attention, but feeling crowded by, breathed upon, just wanting to get on with his work, and so he tells it his way dammit.)

The one about Rivette--first of the Cahiers du Cinema crit-->director gang incl. Godard etc, to actually make a film. but the last to find his own voice", becomes the story of "the auteur as anti-auteur," setting his characters free/making them characters via increasingly wide, shaped spaces of improvisation---countered by the inclusion of Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor since the age of 13, who *cannot* improvise, and there are many other tensions in the accrural of momentum, the challenges to all concerned, incl. viewer as editor, writer, participant---in the relationship of Out 1: Spectre, which encourages paranoid thinking, which "colors matters that are more flatfootedly explicable in the serial," the serial being Noli me tangere:
Spectre was a cult film for decades. It was the film we saw again and again on those rare occasions when it came to town, its abiding mystery forever drawing us back in, and Noli me tangere was perhaps the solution to the mystery, though no one really expected it to one day materialize.
Did not expect HP Lovevcraft to be an inspirational figure for Houellebecq, but as LS tells it, makes all too much sense, ugh.
We also get Lynd Ward, who Sante desribes aa maybe the first American graphic novelist per se starting in the 1920s, way before the term was generally used) though there are also intriguing glimpses of a French role model/preceding woodcuts artist.
Then "The Carpenter (Manny Farber), woodworker by trade, supporting the movie critic and painter, who later went full-time to this last (if only went he could draw Social Security?), then "The Collector (Sophie Calle)" the conceptual artist who could be considered as offering "a parody of a parody," building from the offerings of information science's assurances, polling etc., which Sante sees as in a direct line of descent from reading entrails etc. to reassure leaders ov campaigns (also goes into Surrealists' fascination with such facting).
Then "The Portraitist (Richard Prince" and "The Avenger (David Wojnarowicz)" conclude Part III---Patti Smith was in Part I, Vivian Maier will be in Part IV, Glenn O'Brian and Rene Ricard in Part V, along with many other topics.

Glenn *O'Brien*, duh, sorry Glenn fans.

I was too hard on Exhalation, it is a very good collection of conceptual science-fiction, and that first story, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate manages to create a metaphysical braid of fate and moral reward. The title story neatly brings together consciousness, entropy, and environmental sustainability into a fable. The pieces are weighted more to the style of philosophical exemplars or fables than the dramatic, but doesn't affect their goodness, only perhaps the mood in which you would choose to pick them up.

Also, the first volume of Bataille's The Accursed Share. A hilarious introduction where he basically says 'if this book fails for you, through a lack of strength or cogency, then that's success and you've just missed the point.' I'm not sure how much this holds up as a work of political economy, but as a quasi-mystical tract, it's quite appealing to me (i basically agree with his view, while feeling that too little is rigorously defined, and really just sitting back and enjoying lines like 'Beyond out immediate ends, man's activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfilment of the universe' (which he then explains in a footnote is a paradox).

tbrr I'm fairly convinced that you could get all the same philosophical info you need out of The Fall's Your Future

Need that Sante book.
Houellebecq wrote a whole book about Lovecraft.

My mother gave me the new Houellebecq for Christmas or my birthday, can't remember which, and I got it out of my house as fast as I could.

"I am old and fat and a french pervert, also I hate Muslims, isn't that interesting" does not make for good novels. Boring writer.

Yeh, I agree w whoever said they aint no Houellebecq gull

I mean, I just don't get what someone is doing reading Houellebecq when they could be reading so many other much more interesting French writers who work with identity, Nationalism, and the abject quite a bit. Blanchot and Bataille alone would take a lifetime to read. Why Houellebecq over them?

Yesterday I finished Elizabeth Bowen, THE LAST SEPTEMBER. A major piece of the literature of the Irish revolutionary period. The ending is crazily abrupt.

Need that Sante book.
Houellebecq wrote a whole book about Lovecraft.

It goes without saying that Blanchot and Bataille should be infinitely ahead of Houellebecq on just about anyone's reading list, but it's a bit of a weird comparison. If anything, Sérotonine features explicitly disparaging passages about Blanchot, and Houellebecq is a noted hater of all things Nouveau Roman-adjacent. But if you want to know more about the state of French mainstream culture in the 21st century, Houellebecq makes for far more informative reading than either of the two Bs. Plenty of people who deem his persona despicable (which it quite obviously is) pay attention to his novels anyway for precisely that reason.

Even if Houellebecq were an interesting proposition (he isn't) his novels are a chore to read and not at all enlivening or enlightening. He's not even interestingly poisonous - his worst crime is being boring.

Note that I didn't make a comparison, I just said that if one wanted to read work *around certain subjects,* they could do better.

Houellebecq sucks, and anyone who takes him seriously is a dope afaic. I told this to a friend who was reading the new one, and he was really shocked at how straightforward my insult was. No room for Islamophobic trash in my world.

Been thinking about reading NYRB edition of In the Café of Lost Youth---is it good?

I am now reading The Fish Can Sing, Halldor Laxness. It is starting out very enjoyably.

I read Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees last year and enjoyed it enough to check out more of her work, but I'm reading Prodigal Summer now and...I've struggled with this with other contemporary writers in the past, but I have a very hard time getting into fiction where the author fails to allow the research that they did for the novel to seamlessly flow into the text. I swear every other descriptive paragraph in this thing is *clunky facts about plants/animals* and it's making it pretty slow going.

(nb I love Moby Dick lol)

Prodigal Summer has that problem that The Poisonwood Bible also does, where it's a multi-strand narrative but only one of the strands has any actual character development. If she'd just stuck to Lusa's story, it would be a much better book.

A hilarious fact about Prodigal Summer, known to everyone in Alaskan literary circles, is that Kingsolver (allegedly) had an affair with Alaskan writer Seth Kantner and then wrote him into the book as the coyote hunter dude. Which is how you get a Southern coyote hunter who knows how to carve walrus ivory.

Had to read 'The Bean Trees' as summer reading before 9th grade. Maybe it was because I was 14, but while I admired some of the politics of the book, I was not too impressed with the style itself. Should probably pick up something by her one of these days, but I'm so deep long my own path...

Speaking of which, I finished Brossard's 'Picture Theory,' and am now halfway through one of her more recent and noticeably less experimental novels, 'Fences in Breathing.' She's truly something else, love her work. Also slowly working through Lisa Lowe's 'Intimacies of Four Continents,' which someone recommended to me on ILE. Holding up so far!

Just received a load of stuff in the mail, and am also leading a manuscript development workshop at the moment, so it looks like I'm really set for a while.

Yeah don't get me wrong, I wouldn't give The Bean Trees a glowing recommendation, but it was enjoyable enough for a first novel that I figured she was worth exploring further. Also, in my recent attempt to focus on late 20th/early 21st century fiction I also read Tartt's The Secret History so the bar is set pretty low.

I mean, she is doing something right, and unlike many (ahem male) authors of her popularity and renown, I actually think the work has some good parts.

Well I haven't given up on Prodigal Summer yet, just needed to vent a little. :)

For some reason I always put her and Anne Lamott together in my head, and I really dislike Anne Lamott. I should probably give Kingsolver another chance!

Was inspired to see if the library had that Luc Sante, instead checked out Peter Doyle’s The Big Whatever, which he wrote the introduction to. The first half is the narrator reading a trashy sex/drugs/rock’n’roll/armed robbery novel in which he appears, mildly disguised; the second half is him tracking down the presumed-dead author. Great runaround fun set in the seedier parts of late-60’s/early 70’s Australia. Apparently there are several earlier novels in the same series.

Also slowly working though Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary.

Pessoa: where should I start? Want to get hit w as many voices as possible in one book, as long as it's good.

Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos "wrote" the most interesting poetry.

The Book of Disquiet isn't meant to be read front to back, at least I didn't. Open it at random.

I'm...not much of a fan of Pessoa, but Alfred has it right, yes.

I'm not a fan either, but, as my comparative lit professor said long ago, read it so you can toss it into your cultural knapsack.

'we are two abysses-- a well staring at the sky' is really all that I remember of him.

I enjoyed the poetry collection A Little Larger Thant The Entire Universe which has selections from his 3 main alter egos.

William Shakespeare - Hamlet

Good?

Yes. Hated this stuff in school but I am little bit more in tune with language and themes plus I've read quite a lot of the classical sources.

I've seen stans of Shirley Hazzard online: The Transit of Venus seems consid her masterpiece, also The Collected Stories is said to be v. great. My local library has The Great Fire. I like some quotes from various stories and novels when her characters comment on love and literature. Highly heated plot elements, evidently. Should I check her out?

I read most of the literary essays in Joseph Conrad's NOTES ON LIFE AND LETTERS.

Also an essay about the first (and last?) time he flew, in an RAF plane in 1917. He also wrote at least two essays about the loss of the Titanic.

Finished Brossard's Fences in Breathing, now starting on Kimberley Alidio's ":once teeth bones coral:". She's got two books out this year, and I've been tasked with reviewing this one...and I think I like the other one a lot better. But only 1/3 into it, so that might change!

Watching a filmed stage production of Synge's PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD. Good but the speed of delivery tends to obscure the greatest thing about Synge, the richness of the language. I wonder if his speeches really need stretching out and slowing down just to let that come through.

xxxp I read The Great Fire many years ago and enjoyed it. The Transit of Venus has been on my list for a while now but still haven't got around to it. My advisor in college, who had pretty good taste (e.g. once taught a course called Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald that was 95% Penelope and like 1 or 2 F. Scott short stories), used to rave about it fwiw.

Will give it a look at the library, thanks!
xp Yeah, that's my experience w Synge as well; for me, he and Shakespeare are best read, w all due props to various productions, incl. on film. (Have seen xxxpost Hamlet[s] of Olivier, Burton, Gibson, Williamson: fave was the pissed-off last, w Anthony Hopkins as Claudius, Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia).

He would seem to be better suited for Richard III than Hamlet, and yet, whining, perverse, sinuous, and sardonic, he is right at the center of Tony Richardson's "Hamlet," itself a mirror of the cosmically bereft times we live in...The tragic framework has been eliminated...likewise the religious references and Christian context...which makes it even more powerful, in for inst a 1970 way, I say! Molly Haskell's perceptive, if somewhat academically funereal (also v 1970) Voice review (open full screen to get whole page) https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qVQQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=N4wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6366,535517

I finished The Fish Can Sing last night. Generally speaking, this novel fits into the coming-of-age category, but Halldor Laxness seemed to have been incapable of writing a novel that fit snugly into any category. It is pleasantly askew and mirthful, while touching more mysterious depths now and again. Would recommend.

I'm now reading The Doctor is Sick an Anthony Burgess novel from 1960. Its tone is miles different than the Laxness. I attribute this to Burgess having grown up saturated in the classism and reflexive snobbery of England, while Laxness was a socialist who grew up on a remote island where even the petty bourgeois were comparatively poor and uneducated.

Finished Happily, a 40-page long poem/short book by Lyn Hejinian.

Almost done with Nell Zink's Doxology. Seems to be aiming for a big sprawling canvas kind of like White Teeth. It starts out like a Gen-X hipster nostalgia novel but then widens the zoom to take in the previous and next generation as well (so I guess the Boomers and Millennials). On the surface it might be taken for a contrasting tale of Gen X irony and cynicism and Millennial idealism, but its more complex than that. A theme is how each idealistic person ends up striking their own bargain with reality. Zink keeps the story moving along at a sprightly pace which is good in a book of this length, but by not dwelling on any one thing for very long and treating everything with the same kind of quick ironic tone, you end up feeling like she doesn't have a good sense of what the most compelling parts of her story are, where perhaps we would have wished to spend more time and dig a bit deeper.

I am for some reason reading my third traumatic upbringing memoir in a year. First was Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy - less traumatic (mostly), more bonkers, parents religious and insane but not dangerously so. Then Mary Karr's The Liar's club, parents not religious but dangerously insane. Now Tara Westover's Educated, parents religious and dangerously, criminally, near lethally insane. They've all been eye opening and worthwhile but I think I'm done with this genre now.

Oryx and Crake, about 20% in, and i want to sack off work until the flashbacks get around to finally describing the terrible thing that happened.

(Although something is screwed about the page numbers, chapters will finish on page "10 of 16". I think the main count is fine but the per chapter numbers are wrong)

Moving between Conversations With Losey by Michel Ciment (director gives good chat) and Dubliners by James Joyce (author gives good craic)

xp I liked Oryx and Crake, deeply weird book, I’ve got the rest of the trilogy but haven’t read them yet. Feel like there’s not much love for them on ILB?

I'm still slowly making my way through Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. I'm going to end up with cliches but it's luminously beautiful. The Arctic feels a spare enough environment - in its human habitation, its fauna and flora - and Lopez has clearly spent so much time there, that he seems to have a total grasp of it, and is able to hold each piece in his hand and examine it minutely. He also has an ability to bring the austere, ringing cold into his prose, sections of which are beautiful meditations on the cycles of the seasons, migration cycles, our position on the planet. (He uses 'Eskimo' as a marker of ethnicity, which feels horribly dated but it's 35 years old so I guess of its time.)

The movement of animals in the Arctic is especially compelling because the events are compressed into but a few short months… They come north in staggering numbers, travel hundreds even thousands of miles to be here during those few weeks when life swirls in the water and on the tundra and in the balmy air. Standing there on the ground, you can feel the land filling up, something physical rising in it under the influence of the light, an embrace or exultation. Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breating. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall.

I met him once. He said he didn't like THE DARK KNIGHT because it endorsed a fascist Batman.

He hadn't actually seen the film.

Popping in two weeks late to say China Mieville OTM (and good on him for not bothering to watch it first).

Book club read: The Adventures Of Maud West, Lady Detective. Investigation of an early 20th century figure used as a springboard for all sorts of social history - WWI, the suffraggetes, divorce laws. Fun and frothy, tho I sometimes lost patience with the author's good faith towards her clearly self-mythologizing subject (DID Maud West truly bust a cocaine ring in Brazil? Well, it's POSSIBLE...).

Now gonna start Francoise Hardy's autobio.

Cool, please tell us about that one for sure.

"It is not a barren wall, it's living sweetness pressed into a wall, bunches of grapes pressed together."---"I don't believe it."---"Taste it."---"I'm too incredulous to lift a hand."---"I'll put a grape to your mouth, then."---"I won't be able to taste it from incredulity."---"Then drop!---"Didn't I tell you that the barrenness of this wall is enough to lay a man out?"
That's from Kafka's The Lost Writings, recently published by New Directions, translated by Michael Hofmann, and selected by Reiner Stach, who also wrote the afterword.
More uses of humor than expected, to a range of effects, incl. at least one that turns out like a sketch from Yiddish theater, if not a Mel Brooks movie. Also one that involves a power figure's much younger wife, uh-oh: more about sex and gender than expected as well---been a long time since I've read him, though. (Those last two are almost as long as it gets in here, like a couple pages each.)
Don't worry, it's also Kafkaesque:
A delicate matter, this tiptoeing across a crumbling board set down as a bridge, nothing underfoot, having to scrape together with your feet the ground you are treading on, walking on nothing but your reflection down in the water below, holding the world together with your feet, your hands cramping at the air to survive this ordeal.
Those are among my favorites so far, but some don't seem to work as well, though even here, he sets the bar fairly high.

Walter Mosley just won the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, which reminds me to ask: where should I start with him? Mysteries, science fiction, mainstream literary---so prolific, and my local library has so many.

I read half of John Blades' introduction to Joyce's PORTRAIT.

I am about 10% into rereading Kate O'Brien's THE LAND OF SPICES (1941). It's all about Irish Catholic nuns and in some cases their European roots. Not really the most familiar milieu to me, even though ec20 Ireland in general is a history I know comparatively well.

Now reading The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard. One could stock a medium-sized library with books about the Nazis so he gets credit right off the bat for finding a different angle.

I did a disservice to Tara Westover's Educated upthread by calling it a traumatic upbringing memoir. I mean it is, but a very good one - at once hard to read and hard to put down. But it's also very insightful on the insidious nature of mental abuse, how it feeds into self doubt and makes it hard to escape even when the opportunity is there. Even with that insight it's kind of astonishing how many times she goes back even when to do so is to put herself in physical danger, how reluctant she is to break ties with her family and even with just her father, who any disinterested observer would write off as an irredeemable monster; and how long her guilt at doing so persists, even after she's free and has weathered the subsequent mental breakdowns.

20 more pages into Oryx and Crake and the snuff videos and child exploitation started 8(

I finished The Doctor is Sick last night. Burgess tried to make it entertaining in several different ways that were rather cleverly yoked together, but the unifying element is Burgess' obvious fascination with and revulsion from human squalor of all varieties. He decorates this central theme with some streamers of linguistical trivia and much painfully crude spelling that attempted to reproduce 'funny' dialects, but it is relentless human squalor that dominates all else.

He does his best to make it all amusing. The fact that he often succeeds generated my main interest in finishing the book. I can justly state that it's a somewhat likeable book, if one likes that sort of thing.

Aimless, I know you and I don't get along in many respects, but I do appreciate hearing about what you're reading, among other things. I'll have to pick this one up, sounds right up my alley.

He wrote way too many books to bother to keep up with, but that one is worth reading for various reasons.

I've never read Burgess. I should probably remedy that.

I've read about a half dozen of his books. A Dead Man in Deptford is an interesting recreation of Kit Marlowe's shadowy life and death. Inside Enderby was a rather fun send-up of poets and their highly equivocal position in society. I've never read A Clockwork Orange, but glancing through it, it strikes me as a very sneering and sour book, an epitome of an old man yelling at the world to get off his lawn.

Ha, don’t think he was too old when he wrote that one, but yeah.

The thought of wading through all the made-up slang was enough to deter me any time I picked that one up.

I thought it was pretty good, as was his reason for making it up.

I think it was a clever idea, it's just my laziness.

Progress report on the Hardy autobio: early years marred by grandmother instilling body image issues on her, which she still struggles with - somewhat upsetting (tho I guess shouldn't be surprising) to think that the sort of melancholic, sorrowful style that made her such an icon of gallic chic came down to her being a person deeply unhappy in her own skin. She's critical of her early work too, and how quickly the book turns from her being a regular kid to a superstar really shows how young she was. She's smart and scathing on journalists who tried to humiliate yé yé singers with political/literary questions and of "intellectual" directors like Jean-Daniel Pollet (who directed her) who used cinema as a vehicle for their ideas without checking if those idea's visual translations had aesthetic value.

Also the very begining of the book is a story her mum tells of her crying every night the first month of her life but, because the mum never went to her, finally stopping. This is told by her mum as a "that's how you treat children!" story.

I've begun By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano. 130 pages of pure monologue, no chapters, no paragraphing.

Read that one in summer 2009 when I was deadly ill with strep throat, don't remember anything about it except I liked it enough to spend what little money I had on 2666 afterwards.

I've started Gail Scott's 'Heroine.' Guess I'm on an experimental lesbian novelists from Montreal kick this year, given my Brossard obsession of the past few months.

Anyway, Scott mixes in a lot more French than I was expecting, which is fine because I can read the language relatively well, but was surprising nonetheless.

Misread 'Gail Scott's 'Heroine' as Gil Scott-Heron, was startled by lesbian references.

i'm (re)reading Blood Meridian by listening to the audiobook, and i do love the book, and the guy reading the audiobook is good, but the experience is reminding me of "you can type this shit, but you can't say it".

Finished Aubyn's A Clue to the Exit, his worst novel by some distance, with prose purpler than a Swamp Thing caption, and yet... some great one-liners as usual, and a few pages are cut-out-and-keep-in-your-wallet good.

I finished By Night in Chile. It was what normally gets described as a tour de force, a display of the author's sheer power over their material. In this case, Bolano's material was the intellectual and literary community of Chile, just prior to and during the Pinochet junta. It was filled with references to specific authors, as touchstones for specific points Bolano wished to make about that community, none of whom did I recognize apart from Pablo Neruda.

But, even though I am an ignoramus about Chile's literary canon, it was a compelling and astonishing book. It was not a book with a plot or a plan, so much as a pure, ceaseless artesian spring of imagination, memory and language, the overflow of his personal vision of Chile. Like ttitt, I'll promptly forget every detail of it, but it was a remarkable experience anyway.

Yes, your description in your second 'graph there matches my experience to a 't.' Will never forget how much I enjoyed reading it— I actually believe I've given it as a gift once or twice since!

By Night in Chile was my intro to Bolanos too -- I was carried away. The Savage Detectives disappointed me. 2666 won me back.

Bolaño obv

Yeah, understood, but I don't have an easy way to include the ñ, unless there's one nearby that I can c&p.

That's what I usually do

I finally figured that out, on an all devices. Bolaño, Buñuel, etc.

éåߥ øñ måçböök

I used the hell out of this old win 7 and its predecessors for a total of 15 years, at least, before I read a kid's mention of character maps, which this one sure has---thanks, kid!
Good old thread: Roberto Bolano

thx. i just found the character map utility on my win7 desktop. will use.

If one is using a phone, it's also pretty simple these days: Glück, Bolaño, s'arrêter, etc

Right. And on my Mac laptop, I just use alt-something for the magic signs, so alt-u for umlaut, alt-n for the tilde, alt-I for the circomflex: Glück, Bolaño, s'arrêter, etc.

I'm now on to The Curse of Bigness: Anti-Trust in the New Gilded Age, Tim Wu, based on a comment by caek on another thread. Seems very readable, but after 50 pages of laying the historical groundwork I'm waiting for it to get to the modern era. I'm already fully in agreement with the premise that the USA and the world in general is beset by a heavy burden of monopolies and near-monopolies, funneling vast sums of money into fewer and fewer hands and this must be reversed.

Yeah that was more of a legal history than the manifesto (with historical context) I was expecting

see also https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710

Yeah he wrote a book on the same subject. I read the wu one because it was 150pp instead of 600.

Finished Oryx and Crake, which turned out to be a pandemic novel. The one bit I don't understand is why he killed oryx.

And I enjoyed it but am not clamouring to read parts 2 and 3. Same happened with Wool a few years ago. They sit fine as a single book with a mystery ending.

Is Fat City any good? Saw the NYROB edition at Barnes & Noble of all places. I'm in the area again today, so I may pick it up if y'all approve.

iirc the John Huston movie is a faithful adaptation, I liked them both

I am reading "Master and Margarita". Crazy magic realism larks tend to irritate me but I'm enjoying it so far.

Fat City is very good indeed.

Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgwick

big thumbs up for ‘fat city’ from me

saw a nice used copy of The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book at the shop today. i flipped through it and it looked totally nuts, in a good way but also i have a hard time imagining myself actually reading it. i didn't end up buying it but kinda tempted to go back and grab it

If you ever do, flopson, I'll gladly talk about it with you. That stuff is my bread and butter.

that's a great incentive :-)

This Kate O'Brien novel is going to take a while to finish ... again.

I'm about 50 pages into a public library copy of Reaganland. Now I need to decide if I am enthusiastic enough to read the remaining 850 pages. I'll dip in again tonight and decide if it's just too depressing.

Is Kate O'Brien any good? She's about the only Virago Modern Classics-revitalised writer who never really appeared, but I don't know why. Had an impression of religiosity and Mills & Boonishness which is probably very incorrect.

appeaLed, not appeaRed

I finished Vuillard's The Order of the Day. More people should write books like this, and I don't just mean the length. Find a few minor characters and less-well-known moments that illuminate a well-known historical event; apply some literary techniques and drop some philosophical-poetical asides; allude to other interesting rabbit holes that the reader can follow or not, given time, interest and access to Google and/or Wikipedia; don't overstay your welcome.

Now alternating between Nikolai Leskov stories and a 1950s SF anthology.

I'm about 50 pages into a public library copy of Reaganland. Now I need to decide if I am enthusiastic enough to read the remaining 850 pages. I'll dip in again tonight and decide if it's just too depressing.

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless)

I couldn't stop reading, my depression was too advanced.

James M: massive interest in Catholicism, yes. Mills & Boon, from what I've read: no. She's much more serious than that.

In this novel a senior nun writes to another senior nun in French, and the novel just presents the 3 pages of French. That wouldn't be allowed now.

Reaganland is too much like torture. It's going back to the library. If Perlstein's detailed dig into the electoral history of the modern conservative movement has any core message it's that organizing is the muscle, brains, heart and soul of electoral politics, just as it has always been. All that changes are the tools.

The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard, as it happens.

i enjoyed The Order of the Day, though i wasn't entirely sure *why*. probably along the lines generally of nate's post. it felt *selective* in a... good way, but also to an end i couldn't really pin down. just found my original post on it here. that's fairly harsh tbh. i enjoyed it more than that and felt it had an impact beyond my immediate interpretation of it. in truth i read it fairly carelessly and shd probably read again.

anyway, The War of the Poor is very slight, and takes a slightly serpentine route following Thomas Müntzer's millenarian career - he'll be familiar to anyone who's read The Pursuit of the Millennium. The tone is very hither and thither, no real sense of focus, leading to a similar feeling of... 'what is this?' i got with the order of the day. the short chapter on the peasant's revolt is good, but i found myself wondering about the blend of anecdote and history in there. also - someone else on ilx will be able to put me right -

'Today, the lowliest user's guide is in English; they speak English everywhere: in train stations, business offices, airports; English is the language of merchandise, and these days, merch is God. But back then Latin was used for public announcements, while English remained the lingo of ragmen and roughnecks.'

This all feels wildly suspect, as always in that space between translation and the translated. French was the language of the court, 'English' feels like an extremely equivocal term here, also 'business offices'?

Elsewhere tone is suspect but it's not clear whether because of translation or original. As with The Order of the Day, I can't quite make up my mind about it, which is interesting in itself.

ugh, tho now i'm not sure, because i was checking against norman davies' the isles for this period, and he's just said in this chapter 'Richard II was said to have addressed Jack Cade's rebels in their native tongue.' well that would be weird as Richard II was deposed as is well known, thanks Shakespeare, in 1399 and died a year later. Cade's rebellion wasn't until 1450ish. wat tyler, sure. but not jack cade.

Again from Davies

"In 1363, for example, the Lord Chancellor was said to have opened a parliamentary session for the first time in English. That same session passed the so-called Statue of Pleadings: ‘The King has ordained . . . that all pleas which shall be pleaded in any court whatsoever . . . shall be pleaded, shown, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue, and that they shall be entered and enrolled in Latin.’"

idk, Vuilldard's point feels forced for *reasons*, and given the looseness of his approach, in itself quite appealing, you expect that cloth of looseness to sit on a framework of rigour imo. that is the only excuse for looseness, that you have hidden constraints.

by god this davies book on the isles is serious garbage. it has ONE (1) passing reference to the peasant's revolts, which it gets wrong, by half a century (see above). it has only THREE (3) references to Richard II.

ONE of those is cited in a quote from a medievalist bemoaning the influence of shakespeare on a student perception of history:

I have lately begun to realise that the great majority, even of those who claim to be educated, are very hazy ... about everything that happened before 1485. To the brighter schoolboy, the reign of Richard II suggests (with luck) the Peasants Revolt...

to the brighter schoolboy, *not including Norman f'ing Davies in his history of the British Isles. gah. that's really annoyed me.

i've literally picked this book up to pick into and refer when i need it, not to read from cover to cover. and literally the only times i've picked it up, it's proved itself to be egregiously shit.

literally literally.

i genuinely would have been better informed reading 1066 And All That.

My present book is Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin, in the NYRB edition. The narration and prose style are idiosyncratic, but interesting and it comes off fairly well in the Michael Hofman translation.

Then watch Fassbinder's film!

TV series, really.

(I know this is the most annoying argument but I saw that damn thing in the cinema and when a "film" gets broken up in regular intervals for opening credits...)

yeah I remember catching a great chunk of taht tv show when it was on was it Channel 4 in the early 80s.
I know taht Chris Bohn loved it so much he adopted the name Biba kopf from the name of teh main protagonist which he may still go by.
THink I tried to d/ld it a few years ago but couldn't get the subtitles to sync or something.

Saw some of it but managed to miss most of it. I wonder what I was doing instead? Probably rehearsing with some band or something stupid.

i think it’s all here. the subs look all right apart from some formatting issues.

In the Françoise Hardy bio: she did a TV special with German schlager star Udo Jurgens, where the concept was they were dating. They allowed her to pick anyone as a guest, so she chose Ionesco, who proceeded to get sloshed on the occasion. The special never aired because there was a scene with them in bed (not Ionesco).

Hardy was also friends with Patrick Mondiano and played him a Stockhausen record, which caused him to collapse in laughter.

Really got to check that, thanks for keeping us with it.
I remembered our good Borges discussion upthread, but not particulars of this kick-off, totally jazzed by re-read---are the Professor Borges talks in here too?
Jorge Luis Borges - The Total Library Non-Fiction 1922-1986

500 pages worth of essays and (later in life, due to what seems like a mixture of further fame and blindness) transcried talks. The essays up to 1955 or so (pre-blindness) are a series of optical illusions. He has an incredible ability to convey the essence of a whatever he is reading or seeing (about a dozen film reviews here) in about 3/4 highly satisfying pages that also manage to display the sense that he has read about half a dozen books on that book or author (this could be another optical illusion but maybe if you spend all your life reading or writing that might be true, either that or he has good skim-reading ability). That's whether he is writing for a journal, the desk, or a woman's magazine. Throughout, we have a series of slightly longer essays that seem like 3/4 pages stitched together, as he talks about the translators of The Arabian Nights (v interesting discussion of Orientalism as a thing before Said?) Benjamin's essay on it gets far more hits than Borges and while there isn't a take on it per se that isn't fused with the books he discusses it feels a little unfair. I love his 20 pages on Dante, just different aspects of the book, on Icelandic Sagas, on Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát (this was a marvel, his account of Fitzgerald felt like a short story!), Flaubert, Gibbon, Coleridge, and first reads of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner as being published for the first time - his reckoning with modernism and sharp judgment (the way he is so open to what Joyce does on Ulysses while at the same time struggling through Finnegans Wake, compare this to Woolf's dismissal based on snobbery and jealousy in her diaries), plus his Refutation of Time (which has won out in discussion of literature) over space is something to go back to. The range of reading on a level I have not seen since Auerbach's Mimesis (Auerbach ofc also published his own separate account of Dante) that feels like reading has taken place (unlike George Steiner lol, no name dropping). Both are as light and exhausting as they try to give as open a read as their faculties will allow them (at the edge!), and for the Borges there is no better demonstration of how a writer of fiction worth reading is always a reader first and foremost.

In the end its clear how I took Borges for granted too. I reckon Labyrinths is a possibly flawed collection. The power of the stories doesn't put the essays in perspective. Also brings to mind how people like Eco and Manguel really feel like bad copies of him. It can't be empahsized how much of a one-off Borges was.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, September 30, 2020

You know all those Poll threads on here: 'List our favourite book of 1922', etc?

Now I'm logged in to ILB I can't see them. Where are they?

Strange, I can see them. The thread titles all begin with "wherein" if that helps with searching.

I searched, and, I think, voted, but now I still can't see them on New Answers!

Have you hidden ilb from site new answers? https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/CustomiseSiteNewPostsControllerServlet (link available under preferences)

There is also a “hide polls” option iirc

I only look at ILB New Answers - hadn't ever occurred to me to look at whole site New Answers!

I don't think I've hidden polls but will check that.

An excerpt of Jack, the latest novel in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series, quickly hooked me like good piano music, going back and forth through different keys, subthemes, shadings, narrative clarity and momentum, just emphatic enough, no overselling. Local library doesn't have it yet, so I've started with the first, Gilead, which continues the effect, and the narrator mentions that he often writes with the radio on, so maybe that's an influence, the flow of detail in and among shows, programming, stations, marking, coloring time and vice-versa (at one point mentions that during a maybe long-past dark period, he sat up 'til all stations were off the air).
So he's sitting there on the prairie, in his house, this old pastor who is disconcerted to realize that he's written "more than Saint Augustine," with not nearly the quality, and mainly every sermon he ever preached, now bagged up in the attic, fire hazards in this dry land, and he's always written all kinds of things and now he's writing a letter to his five-year-old son, to be read when he's gone, because he's dying, while still walking around, even feeling pretty good, considering. and he spent all his money on books, incl. the ones he won't live long enough to read, long before the kid's future mother walked into his church while he was preaching---now he's got the loves of his life, and he can't leave the kid anything much, except this letter.
Which, since he's a writin' fool, goes back and forth, from and to self-explanation and other possibly useful observations of human nature, adventures and other speculative memories of and with bis own father, grandfather, mother, neighbors, and their own lore--- also becoming a diary, in a way that just seems natural for this guy (also that it will go on for 242 hardback pages---happy reading, kid).

Trying to decide what to start next— another Gail Scott novel, my friend Mark's latest book of poems, or a book that I'm supposed to review sometime before the year is up. I'm currently done teaching and have no grading for the next week, so I'm a bit...free up to start whatever. Might begin with my friend's book, since it's so short and I'll be able to finish it before the day is out.

i’ve read a *lot* of garbage pop factual books this year, but one that isn’t garbage is Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing by Gretchen McCulloch. That’s doubly good, because it’s a subject that could be done *very badly* and glibly imo. But this is thoughtful, clear and exceptionally well annotated, and contains structured thinking and analysis. It’s slightly overfriendly in places for my taste but that works because of the subject matter.

anyway, in a year where i read a load of shite, this is... ok-to-good.

no, it’s good. it’s christmas. enough with the parsimonious.

Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth - Edward Tufte, big fan of his earlier books on data visualisation, with amazing things like indonesian timetable representation etc, and this is also v good. but man i cannot quite get away from a nagging feeling 'you know, edward, your pages are kind of a hot mess to read?' and frankly seem to work against some of his statements on space. i'm surprised, because his wife and co-designer is Inge Druckrey, subject of this lovely short documentary on design.

also enough about your f'ing park already please.

Read Mark Francis Johnson's '800 JKS,' an exercise in world-building poetry that will inevitably be slept upon by the majority, who can't stand poetry that challenges rather than confirms.

Also read Denise Riley's 'Selected Poems,' which mostly consists of her most famous book, 'Mop Mop Georgette,' and of course love her to pieces still.

Flipped around a bunch in Tom Raworth's collected poems.

Read a lovely pamphlet on literary influence, criticism, and death by Claudia La Rocco.

Finally, and perhaps most excitingly, I picked up a book I've been carrying around with me for almost a decade but could never access...but I had an intuition that the day would come when I could. And so, the other evening I began Taylor Brady's 'Microclimates,' which is a bizarre and majestic hybrid novel that treats each sentence as its own little climate, playing around with syntax, subject/object, and so on. Really amazing work.

that sounds good, will add to my infinity pile (which as always i say 'i'll aim to make a good dent in it at christmas')

Yes to those and yr own latest recs., Fizzles. Thanks guys!

Which of Edward Tufte's previous books is your favorite?

I found a copy of Visual Explanations on a coffee table in a lobby when I was in uni, with a big COLLEGE REPUBLICANS sticker on the back of it. I contacted the woman whose name was written in it, and she never wrote back, so I kept it. Nice come-up, also my favorite.

I now only have 85 pages of THE LAND OF SPICES to read.

Oddly indulgent, very long description of a Catholic schoolgirls' school play for the priests. Unsure that the tone is as well judged as Kate O'Brien's admirers would assert.

I finished Berlin Alexanderplatz last night. First, I must applaud the translator Michael Hofman for carrying this off so beautifully. The book succeeds just as much on its stylized tone and authorial voice as upon any interest generated by the plot and characters and it is obvious that the translator had to patiently invent an English near-analog to Döblin's highly idiosyncratic German, while conveying the essential tone and feel of the original. The loving care he took was very evident.

The Afterword quotes Musil to the effect that it is not an intellectual book, but full of interest, and I wholly agree. Döblin incorporates a great many ideas, religious, mythic, scientific, psychological, but they do not add up to anything coherent. They are jumbled together in a grab bag, just as they are experienced in life.

NB: It was published in 1929, so we should soon see it making an appearance in the "Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of..." threads, assuming Daniel Rf perseveres that far.

I read the previous translation about 25 years ago and loved it, I should investigate this one. I agree that the book is full of stuff that doesn't necessarily add up, but details are fuzzy at this point.

Will have to check that. Recent publication of Kafka's prev, mentioned The Lost Writings shows Hoffman keeping up his standards w quite a range of material.

So, I checked out three P.K. Dick novels from the library and on advice of ilxors started reading A Scanner Darkly. Right away, from the first three sentences I can tell PKD had started writing the book by just throwing out a vaguely 'promising' sentence off the top of his head, not having the slightest clue what story he would connect to it. All his books I've read seem to start this way, with the possible exception of Man in the High Castle.

He rambled around for a few pages, just riffing on the first sentence, until he darts sideways into a new riff, then another, until there's a tiny bit of solid ground established, barely enough to stand on. Then he builds out from there, but haphazardly. For example, early in the second chapter he starts riffing on the amazing 'scramble suit' worn by some cop named Fred. PKD tells me how the identity of the wearer of the suit becomes blur and their voice is filtered to be toneless, flat and mechanical, bereft of personality. Wow. Very imaginative stuff!

Then, just a few paragraphs later, PKD describes Fred (wearing the suit) and speaking to a Lions Club audience. But PKD has already forgotten about the toneless flat mechanical voice. He now has Fred giving a speech full of scripted dramatic pauses and changes of tone. These totally contradictory details are printed on fucking consecutive pages! Why? Because PKD apparently never went back and read what he wrote five minutes earlier, or gave it a second thought once it got blurted out on the page. It makes me want to slap him retroactively and shout "You're just blabbering complete nonsense, Phil! Give me a fucking break!"

This is not encouraging. If PKD couldn't be bothered to pay the slightest bit of attention to what he wrote, then why should I? Did he take his readers for such fools or did he just not give a damn at all?

you should stop!

i should also breathe while I'm at it, but I don't care for an author who carelessly doles out intellectual wedgies to his readers.

my understanding is that he was drugged out of his mind most of the time? anyway i've read a couple and there is absolutely no prize at the end if you hate the first three sentences that much

having read four of his books, I already have some idea about his utter lack of method and disregard for telling a coherent story, but the beginning of this one feels like wading through a swamp that's had trash dumped in it and I had to vent. I will take it as far as 35 or 40 pages to see if he sobered up enough to write something worth sticking with. But, damn, the start of this one reeks.

I think you have to accept a certain amount of, uh, chaos with Dick? He wrote so quickly (to stay alive, mainly), was battling psychosis and addiction. The vision comes through almost by osmosis or something. Or he'll drive you mad with his lack of discipline and you'll give up, I guess.

I just read the first few pages and, like the first time, was instantly transported into the world of a paranoid and delusional drug addict, so consumed by his own nightmares as to be almost devoid of any fellow-feeling. And the bit about the scramble suit, yes it says the voice is 'toneless and artificial', then the guy gives a speech with pauses and where he raises and lowers his voice, I don't really see a contradiction there.

The Hardy autobio's getting a bit more of a chore as we head into the 70's - which is where my knowledge of her career ends - so I'm alternating it with The Penguin Book Of Japanese Short Stories. Opens with a predictably great Tanizaki story.

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser - The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
Elizabeth Bowen - The Last September
Ali Smith - Autumn

Charles Dickens: A Life. wanna know who dickens had dinner with on the 26, 28, 29, 31st of december 184*? then this is the book for you. lots of details pulled in from the various sources, but not much of it interesting. and 600 pages long.

it's interesting when it's talking about and around the books (made me want to reread Dombey and Dorrit), but the rest of it not so much.

(his poor wife though, and i've not got to the abandonment yet)

and his poor kids!

Only 10 pages or so of Kate O'Brien to go. I suppose what I feel now is that this book is sentimental about its two heroines, but in a deceptively formal and dignified way. They are - up to 10pp from the end - perhaps too perfect.

I'm touched, though, by the fate of Charlie, after he takes a purple / white / green ribbon from a suffragette to make a Votes for Women tie.

OK. I got far enough in to A Scanner Darkly that PKD has settled on the story he wants to write and it is basically about the hard drug addict culture in 1970s California with a light dusting of sci-fi tropes. The point in the book where it gels is when he more or less sets aside the sci-fi content and the writing becomes almost documentary realism, drawn straight from his own life, I presume. I was near enough to the fringe of that scene in the 70s that the squalor of it feels depressingly familiar.

Yes, for those of us who were around then, and any one else who can relate, it's something dark that still smells bad, always there, as soon as the book is opened---in your face, and his: he is testifyin' while still in the midst of it, bringing his talents and skills---incl., always, the documentary realism, to bear and to ground on his crackpot control-freak earthquakes and mudslides and fires of whatever origin, the California Kid locked in Manichean Civil War---although I think the talent won, more often than not, if you read enough of the fiction---though Lethem did him a stan disservice by pushing The Exegesis through the Library of America: that stuff should never be read out of context. Drug culture (inc. cops) were just part of the source material for his ongoing chronicles of illusion and delusion and all manner of fakery as part of consensual realties, incl. as they become known as such, sometimes---basically all the time, because this world is a bad copy of the real one, as became clearer during Watergate, as the False One stumbled (the real world is just a few years A.D.---as became even clearer when he beheld the Christian fish-symbol earring of the Dark-Haired Girl who delivered his pizza)
think you have to accept a certain amount of, uh, chaos with Dick? He wrote so quickly (to stay alive, mainly), was battling psychosis and addiction. The vision comes through almost by osmosis or something. Or he'll drive you mad with his lack of discipline and you'll give up, I guess.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, December 15, 2020 2:38 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I just read the first few pages and, like the first time, was instantly transported into the world of a paranoid and delusional drug addict, so consumed by his own nightmares as to be almost devoid of any fellow-feeling. And the bit about the scramble suit, yes it says the voice is 'toneless and artificial', then the guy gives a speech with pauses and where he raises and lowers his voice, I don't really see a contradiction there.

― ledge, Tuesday, December 15 word

But I do think some of this comes, to some cold-sweat degree, from/toward a place of/desire for fellow feeling--he has to tell us, testify, warn us, maybe to scold some of us who were/are also getting too far into something (and I think this is the one where he mentions having done permanent damage to I wanna say pancreas, via speed)

I think my favourite Dick-adjacent thing is the Emmanuel Carrere sort of biography, autobiography, flight of fancy I Am Alive And You Are Dead'. I read it a while ago but have that residual sense of being close to Dick's consciousness for better and worse.

did carrere do that book on the french/swiss man with the fake life? hang on...

ah yes here we go, The Adversary.

meant to read it when it came out in english but completely forgot until just now.

I don't know that one, sounds interesting. I have his memoir about the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004. Girding myself to read it.

(lol "bad Primo Levi" sez ever-reliable Guardian; just for that, I'll check it out)

Books in which PKD's talent and skillz def prevail incl the first volume of his collected short stories, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man In The High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, also some of the "mainstream" novels, like Confessions of A Crap Artist. Mary and The Giant, and The Broken Bubble.

By the time lists come out, incl. mine, I'm usually pretty much ready to shrug and move on, but this one has a lot of appealing comments---https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/the-best-books-of-2020-picked-by-our-acclaimed-guest-authors---incl. several mentions of Hamnet---is it good?

PKD's birthday today. And Arthur C Clarke's.

incl. several mentions of Hamnet---is it good?

I wasn't moved by it as much as the people in that article - my wife was - but it was pretty good, as historical fiction goes maybe slightly more fanciful than Wolf Hall. It had the best explanation that i've read of the famous 'second best bed' of shakespeare's will.

People latch onto the "second best bed" only because there are only a couple dozen verifiable facts about Shakespeare's personal life, if that many, and it is quirky enough to jump out from such a meager handful. But it means nothing in particular other than what it says on the face of it. That he purchased the right to a family coat of arms is much more boring and conventional, but as a bare fact it is more revealing.

Books you are never going to read:

Mayflies (Faber, £14.99) by Andrew O’Hagan is a gorgeous novel, full of crisp and evocative images. It concerns the love between two best friends. It begins in lustful youth, with a pilgrimage by a group of Glasgow boys to Manchester in the mid-1980s to see Morrissey and visit the Haçienda. It concludes with the same characters in middle age, confronting a crisis.

Hahaha

But it means nothing in particular other than what it says on the face of it.

it may not - we'll never know - but o'farrell gives it a plausible and amusing spin.

No, never gonna read about the lustful journey to Morrisey, but also intrigued by all of this (except the term "pacy"):
Shadi Bartsch’s new translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid (Profile, £16) is terrific (and a gorgeous physical book, too) – fresh and pacy. Bartsch walks the tightrope between maintaining the grandeur of the original and making the poem accessible to modern readers and makes it look easy. The Aeneid is the great refugee narrative of its own time, and it should be for our time too. I am obsessed with Thebes, the home of Cadmus, Oedipus and Antigone. So Paul Cartledge’s Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (Macmillan, £25) is exactly the book for me. Academic books are often a bit dry, but this study of the city – its myth and its history – is anything but dusty. Religion, war and myth are all interrogated with equal rigour. Don’t tell me Thomas Cromwell wasn’t as beautiful and nuanced as Hilary Mantel makes him in The Mirror & the Light (HarperCollins, £25): I don’t want to know, I want to maintain the fantasy. As a sustained act of world-building, time travel and mind-reading, I’m not sure her Cromwell trilogy will ever be equalled. At the beginning of the first lockdown it was honestly more consoling than food.

xp the naive reading is that it was not a happy marriage, the conventional one is that this was standard practice, the best bed was for guests and not the family bed. o'farrell has will give her a fancy new bed to go in her fancy new town house and she says 'i will keep the bed that i conceived and birthed my children in thank you very much', so it becomes a private joke between them.

Yeah, I'll take a look at that when library no longer re-locked down.
xp Also, we need to issue a ban on "makes it look easy," though lack of evident strain v. important. But thanks Natalie Haynes
Broadcaster and author of Pandora’s Jar!

eh. connecting the "second best bed" to any more detailed meaning requires connecting it to missing information. the very fact that multiple, equally plausible speculations have been proposed to explain it only highlights the central vacancy of information that all the theories revolve around. we don't know, can't know, what it means beyond 'I bequeath to my wife the second best bed'. but that never stops anyone from trying.

it's just a bit of fun let's be cool!

obviously, in a historical novel about Shakespeare's family life there's no way an author could avoid including it.

obviously

I guess if the novel was "Shakepeare and the Zombies" the author might dispense with it, but that's more of an ahistorical novel.

Dennis Cooper's list came out a few days ago

https://denniscooperblog.com/mine-for-yours-my-favorite-fiction-poetry-non-fiction-film-art-and-internet-of-2020/

I got Penguin's new-ish (2018) translation of Simplicius Simplicissimus and it's..... something. The translator's note is extraordinary. I've never seen anything like it. I'm going to write it down.

This is a very well-known book. In the German-speaking world (where Simplicius Simplicissimus was first published in 1669) many students become acquainted with at least some of the text before leaving school; in the rest of the world it has been often translated (including into contemporary German, although the German language has not changed hugely since 1669), with many of the translations being into English; and Grimmelhausen's work has a substantial presence on the Internet.

So my editor and I have decided to let readers conduct their own background research to whatever level they require. Rather than produce a learned version of an acknowledged literary by ramming home easily accessible points in long footnotes that will slow down the eye, we prefer to offer an attractive reading experience.

Perhaps, like the translator, readers will discover that a seventeenth-century best-seller can come across as surprisingly modern.

J.A.U.

(That's 'J.A. Underwood.')

What do you guys make of THAT? I have so much to say about this. First of all, look at that first paragraph. A four-lane pileup of semicolons setting out the case: everybody knows this book, there's stuff all over the Internet about it, leave me alone willya? Sheesh, alright alright.

But second... who lets footnotes slow them down? I just don't read them if I don't want to. Make them endnotes if they're really so offensive to the eye. But really? They're worried that someone buying a Penguin Classic of Grimmelhausen in 2018 is going to be put off by.... superscript numbers adorning certain names and phrases? They can't be. It's a preposterous suggestion. The idea that anyone would even swallow it is even a little insulting. I can't help but think they just didn't feel like doing any work. Or their budget was cut. Something went wrong and this is their attempt to style it out.

'This is a very well known book.' Well... maybe? SOME Germans read PARTS of it before going to university. Okay. Not exactly proving your case, but okay. But this is an English translation. Nobody in the English-speaking world reads this unless they're a little weird (raises hand) or studying German literature in higher education.

In any case, their brainwave is to allow the reader to just... look things up on the Internet! And this is going to be "faster" "to the eye" than reading a footnote?? Well - maybe we won't even do that. We'll be surprised, they say, at how modern this little firecracker is. Who needs "learned" notes after all?? (I should say there is a pretty good introduction from Kevin Cramer that sets out the historical and literary context and gives a short bio of Grimmelhausen himself.) So maybe we can just wing it, eh? Or look things up on the Internet if we want to. We're just reading for pleasure, or we're ultra-nerds, either way this approach works - we can nerd out online if we want, or just blaze through.

Indeed the first sentence speaks of a 'new fad'. The second sentence refers to 'daft' fashions. The third uses the word 'celebrities.' In the next graf we hear 'waffling on.' We get modern words like 'twerp' and 'dunno'. Bumptious! But you get a lot of old-fashioned stuff, too. 'Ninny' and 'numbskull', etc. No big deal. But if German hasn't changed that much, maybe it would have been a good idea to use English that hasn't changed that much, either? Words that feel neither obsolete nor... faddish?

And then - and I will stop soon I promise - you really do want a few learned footnotes. What's 'Malmsey wine'? No idea. Presumably a reader in 1669 would have known. The translator appears to think the word 'nob' is shorthand for 'nobleman'. What's 'fernambuck'? 'Minium'? A 'Samoyed'? A 'palliasse'? Off to Google...

sorry should read acknowledged literary masterpiece

Tracer, you don't know what a Samoyed is?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0wjtlSTTiQ

much better than Google tyvm :)

I assiduously read footnotes, so ones that are not that necessary can take me out of a text, however it doesn't seem to make sense if there are so many terms used that are not familiar to the general reader (I have heard of none of the terms you note). having to check a dictionary on your phone while you read is annoying, I read Spanish well but not enough to not have to look up the odd word every few pages and it does make reading in Spanish a little bit less enjoyable

What do you guys make of THAT?

I'd say the translator and Penguin's editor let each other off easy and together skated past parts of their job that required extra thought and effort. I presume this was issued as part of Penguin Classics, which once upon a time held itself to very high standards.

I like to think of myself as a reasonably well read person, and I lived in Germany for 5 years, and I’d never heard of grimelhausen until a couple of months ago when i read a John le carre novel in which it is a recurring plot point. So yeah I feel like the odd footnote might be ok in a penguin edition.