Welcome. Knock the snow off your gumboots so you don't leave a puddle in front of the wing chair by the fire. I'm just sitting here reading Froissart's Chronicles in the Penguin Classics abridgement. According to the Introduction the whole monster would be some 2000+ pages, so this edition just picks out the plums from the pudding. Not bad so far. I'll let you know more when I've really sunk my teeth into it.
So, you, then, what are you reading, eh?
A successor to the thread: Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Thursday, 31 December 2020 19:44 (three years ago) link
starting the year with tinker tailor soldier spy
― no lime tangier, Thursday, 31 December 2020 19:52 (three years ago) link
Reading the second entry in the Southern Reach trilogy, 'Authority.'
― "Bi" Dong A Ban He Try (the table is the table), Friday, 1 January 2021 16:19 (three years ago) link
You just read the first one right? Did you like it then?
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Friday, 1 January 2021 16:28 (three years ago) link
Lorrie Moore, Collected Stories
― Langdon Alger Stole the Highlights (cryptosicko), Friday, 1 January 2021 17:40 (three years ago) link
Brittany Cooper, Eloquent Rage
― brimstead, Friday, 1 January 2021 17:57 (three years ago) link
Brittney Cooper
ā Langdon Alger Stole the Highlights (cryptosicko)
Jealous. She turns jokes into arias.
― Patriotic Goiter (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 1 January 2021 17:58 (three years ago) link
caek, it has sucked me in. The second not as good as the first, but I'm in it for the long haul since it's an easy read and I love nebulous psychological horror stuff.
― "Bi" Dong A Ban He Try (the table is the table), Friday, 1 January 2021 19:32 (three years ago) link
yeah i felt the same (hooked by first book, interest dropped off but finished the trilogy), but i was given it as a gift. i don't think i'd ever read a horror book before, and now i read them because i enjoyed annihilation so much?
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Friday, 1 January 2021 21:54 (three years ago) link
Bassani: The Heron --been saving this, the only one of his Ferrara books I hadn't read. Predictably excellent.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, 1 January 2021 22:40 (three years ago) link
Girl Woman Other. Clearly a cut above some of the other recent selections in my local book club.
― Daniel_Rf, Saturday, 2 January 2021 11:06 (three years ago) link
Underland by Robert Macfarlane. I have a complicated relationship with Macfarlane. Essentially, I think he's a beautiful writer, a genius proponent of Gilbert White's entreaty to 'watch narrowly'. He is also an archaeologist of language, collecting and protecting all kinds of local and specialised vocabularies, not to mention an activist in all kinds of other ways: climate, landscape, flora and fauna. He is also the epitome of what Kathleen Jamie called the 'lone enraptured male': earnest (to a comical degree at times), here to save us from ourselves with his epiphanic visions of the wild and its relationships to the human heart.
I fell away from him around the time of The Old Ways but I've come to accept his writing for what it is and I get a huge amount from it. It's a cliche, but he refocuses the senses; when I'm out I find myself paying closer attention to the sweep of the land, the sensual detail of the immediate. Anyway, Underland is Macfarlane in excelsis. It's clearly been something of a life's work, and through his usual mixture of classical scholarship, deep research (he's a fellow at Cambridge) and wide-ranging fieldwork, he tracks our obsession with that which remains hidden and buried: mine workings in Yorkshire, the catacombs under Paris, the 'red dancer' cave paintings in the wilds of northern Norway, the sites of the foibe massacres in the Julian Alps. There is a thread running through the book, tracing the impact of the Anthropocene and what is currently being uncovered by climate change - in Greenland in particular.
It all has a familiar rhythm: what is quite often perilous fieldwork (there are a couple of moments - in the catacombs, wedged in a 'squeeze' under the Mendips - when I had to put the book down), followed by something more scholarly and contemplative. If there is a weakness, it's in the prose associated with his fieldwork (where I've always found him largely flawless in the past). He's adopted a sort of 'fieldnotes' approach: impressionistic, often verbless. It can be hard going over the course of the whole book.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, 2 January 2021 12:05 (three years ago) link
Re-reading Fitzgerald's collected short stories ('Flappers and Philosophers'). I've read some of them three times before, in different editions, but this is a good one, if alone for bringing all the Pat Hobby stories together.There's no denying how much more uncomfortable I'm with all the n-words, 'blacks', and overall really bad descriptions of people of colour, in a throwaway manner, that's not down to a characters view of the world but just very much of the writer himself. 'Latin people tend to be violent in the American freedom' etc. That aspect did not age well. Most stories though are still just so fucking good.
First novel of the year is Jenny Hval's Girls Against God. Very promising, black metal start!
― A Scampo Darkly (Le Bateau Ivre), Saturday, 2 January 2021 13:30 (three years ago) link
I have four more days before I have to go back to work and so staying in bed reading and sleeping is what Iām doing atm. Was kindly gifted Through the Woods, by Emily Carroll, which I already own (along with several other books which I do not), and have been greatly enjoying rereading it. Itās creepy fairy type takes for adults, that adeptly addresses the dissonance between fairy tales being āfor childrenā and the darkness within. The author writes and illustrates all the stories herself. This one was a webcomic she did before publishing, it gives a good flavour of what the book is like. After this, staying on theme, probably some Tanith Lee?
― scampish inquisition (gyac), Saturday, 2 January 2021 14:07 (three years ago) link
John le CarrƩ: CALL FOR THE DEAD, republished as THE DEADLY AFFAIR - a 1960s film tie-in I think.
A short novel: 4 chapters in it's superbly compelling. As much like a detective as a spy novel.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 2 January 2021 15:10 (three years ago) link
As much like a detective as a spy novel.
I regarded that as a deliberate ploy by an unknown novelist to improve his chances of getting published, reviewed and read ata time when "spy novel" was more associated with Ian Fleming and the James Bond series.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Saturday, 2 January 2021 17:22 (three years ago) link
I bought a Tesla biography, I should have read some reviews first. It was written in 1981 - not necessarily a bad thing but i would have liked more up to date info on some of his underdeveloped ideas and inventions. And then 150 pages in I came across this: "Tesla's hypersensitive vacuum tube might make an excellent detector not only of Kirlian auras but of other so-called paranormal phenomena, including the entities commonly called ghosts." Aaargh!
― ledge, Monday, 4 January 2021 12:09 (three years ago) link
Read a re-issue of late poet Akilah Oliver's 'The She Said Dialogues: Flesh Memory.' Absolutely flattened me.
― "Bi" Dong A Ban He Try (the table is the table), Monday, 4 January 2021 12:13 (three years ago) link
Read some of I Am Damo Suzuki last night. He's just left Ireland been returned to the UK from calais then moved to Germany and got a part in Hair.
I have the start of 1491 read and want to read more of it before long.
I think I'm 2/3 through David Olusoga's The World's War which has been pretty interesting but I lost track during Xmas partially cos i was drinking a lot.
I think i may have some things appearing today that I want to get into. Post has been erratic over Xmas.
Really want to get into some de saint-Exupery stuff I've had in an omnibus for years and not got very far with. Just been reminded of it by the 1929 book poll
― Stevolende, Monday, 4 January 2021 12:47 (three years ago) link
Finished Kenyatta AC Hinkle's 'SIR' this morning. Interesting book, though I was expecting a bit more tbh.
― "Bi" Dong A Ban He Try (the table is the table), Monday, 4 January 2021 16:27 (three years ago) link
Anyone compile a list of what you read in 2020? I'd love to see them for the sake of ideas.
Here's mine.
― Patriotic Goiter (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 4 January 2021 16:41 (three years ago) link
Alfred:
What did you read in 2020?
― Jimi Buffett (PBKR), Monday, 4 January 2021 16:48 (three years ago) link
lol woops! forgot!
― Patriotic Goiter (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 4 January 2021 16:50 (three years ago) link
Speaking of which, I now am going to be keeping a list in my planner, so that i won't spend several hours next New Year's Day hungover and trying to construct my list.
― "Bi" Dong A Ban He Try (the table is the table), Monday, 4 January 2021 18:15 (three years ago) link
I'm finding this Penguin Classics abridged edition of Froissart's Chronicles to be quite pleasantly readable.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Monday, 4 January 2021 18:22 (three years ago) link
Kikuko Tsumura's There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job. It's pretty funny.
― oscar bravo, Wednesday, 6 January 2021 18:09 (three years ago) link
About 25 pages into Reza Negarestani's "Cyclonopedia," which I haven't read since I gave away my first copy more than five years ago or so. I had forgotten how totally batshit it is, but also how really stunningly insightful in certain ways, if one is into esoteric theory-fiction about Jihad, the war machine, and oil.
― Pere Legume (the table is the table), Wednesday, 6 January 2021 18:17 (three years ago) link
I'm starting off the year with Gallic Noir: Volume 1 an anthology of 3 short novels by Pascal Garnier. I've finished the first 2. They are pretty good noir. I actually wouldn't mind reading another volume of these.
― o. nate, Thursday, 7 January 2021 03:42 (three years ago) link
i'm reading The Arrest right now.
the first line of the the chapter that describes the sudden social/environmental collapse after which the book is set feels very timely.
"Without warning, except every warning possible, it had come."
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Thursday, 7 January 2021 21:25 (three years ago) link
Morley, A Sound Mind
― alimosina, Friday, 8 January 2021 19:43 (three years ago) link
I started reading "The Only Good Indians" by Stephen Graham Jones. It's quite a treat so far, but it's getting a little too intense for me so i had to pause!
― dean bad (map), Friday, 8 January 2021 20:20 (three years ago) link
it's a contemporary native american ghost / horror story that's very funny and entertaining if that's your bag
I believe I am going to put aside the Negarestani for nowā while it is as interesting as I remember it being, there's only so much Deleuzian "speculative theology" I can take at one time, and about 50 pages in, I'm ready for it to end. There's also something about the proliferation of numerological wingnuttery that's driving me up a wall. In any case, I like it a lot, but its rewards are diminishing, and I just received a delicious book order in the mail.
― Pere Legume (the table is the table), Friday, 8 January 2021 20:22 (three years ago) link
I finish John le CarrƩ: CALL FOR THE DEAD aka THE DEADLY AFFAIR. It's excellent, brisk and detailed. A terrific introduction to this writer.
A reservation would be that occasionally JLC leaves his detailed workaday narration and gets into something else - eg: a peroration on 'the dream of the socialist system', 'the grand delusion of the Eastern bloc, which fuelled his fanaticism', etc. It's not that I think this reactionary, rather that it comes out as slightly gauche, overplayed, excessively abstract in relation to the level of the rest of the narrative. It may be that it seems hackneyed to me because JLC himself went on to make it such a feature.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 10 January 2021 10:51 (three years ago) link
i would very much agree with that assessment, pinefox. 'excellent, brisk and detailed' is a very good description of his early work and call for the dead in particular i think.
i'm rereading Lud-in-the-Mist, something I'd been meaning to do for a while, but prompted by and preparatory to a ledge question on the year-polls threads.
Also a Jen Calleja pamphlet on goblins, and Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy by Michael J Mazarr, on the Iraq War. Founded on a frankly indigestible base of American exceptionalism, but quickly proving fascinating on the process of decision making. I'm particularly interested in the second Iraq war as one of the key events at the beginning of this current period, which i will never stop calling 'this current conjuncture' despite irritating even myself with it.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 10 January 2021 18:19 (three years ago) link
Makes sense, relating it to resurgence of (even more broadly xenophobic) Klan after WWI, and rolling right through the Twenties, into the Depression-era heyday of Father Coughlin's populist fascism, other figures like Lindbergh.
― dow, Sunday, 10 January 2021 20:16 (three years ago) link
200 pages into Vasily Grossmanās Stalingrad. Itās very absorbing, with lots of interesting footnotes regarding the various manuscripts that were revised depending on the official attitude towards Stalin, and the level of openness to criticism of Soviet leadership.
― JoeStork, Sunday, 10 January 2021 20:28 (three years ago) link
Currently about to finish Kimberly Alidio's once teeth bones coral. Took me a minute, but I finally picked it up and its sparse, quotidian method of composition finally clicked.
― Pere Legume (the table is the table), Sunday, 10 January 2021 21:58 (three years ago) link
Jon Ronson - So you've been publicly shamed ... decent throughout, the Jonah Lehrer chapter being more critical of lehrer than I had heard. no real conclusion, much like the other Ronson book I read.Charles Portis - Masters of Atlantis ... very good until the (thematic) fizzle out of the endingJean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea ... gets too obfuscated for me, like eliding the wedding and revealing the sandi relationship very late on. still has a lot of good parts.
― wasdnuos (abanana), Monday, 11 January 2021 05:09 (three years ago) link
I read Don DeLillo's new novella, THE SILENCE (2020). It's pretty bad. I suspect that it may well be the worst thing DeLillo has ever published. It's barely even interesting enough to be self-parody. Possibly the most interesting thing about it is that it's printed in Courier font.
― the pinefox, Monday, 11 January 2021 12:09 (three years ago) link
I then started on Jennifer Egan's MANHATTAN BEACH (2017).
I finished Froissart's Chronicles (abridged Penguin Classics edition, 470 pages). Perhaps the most interesting aspect was that the height of the Black Death plague years occurred within the time frame covered by the book, but Froissart mentions it only once in a single sentence. Admittedly, this book was an abridgement and Froissart was working from an earlier chronicle for that time period, not his own witnessing, but one mention that "a third of the people died"? Yikes!
His cavalier attitude becomes a bit more explicable in light of the complete contempt Froissart has for peasants. They only appear in his account because the Jacquerie in France and the Peasant's Revolt under Wat Tyler took place as he was writing his chronicle. The grievances of the peasants are dismissed as nonsense and their leaders as criminals. By way of contrast, Froissart apparently spent dozens of pages describing in detail every single combat that took place in one month long jousting tournament. In this edition they are abridged down to only about 8 or 9 pages worth. Oh, how he loved the nobility!
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Monday, 11 January 2021 19:57 (three years ago) link
I began Diarmuid Hester's 'Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper,' and it's pretty absorbing, but Dennis is also a friend and a favorite author, so my bias is obvious
― Pere Legume (the table is the table), Monday, 11 January 2021 22:25 (three years ago) link
Are Sally Rooney's novels good? Thinking about trying the latest.
― dow, Tuesday, 12 January 2021 01:06 (three years ago) link
I suspect not!
But I'd quite like to find out for sure.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 12 January 2021 10:45 (three years ago) link
I liked Normal People fine. A quick read, too.
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 12 January 2021 11:12 (three years ago) link
I preferred Conversations with Friends
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 12 January 2021 11:13 (three years ago) link
I wanted to shout at the 'Normal People' to just bleedin' talk to each other.
― ledge, Tuesday, 12 January 2021 11:14 (three years ago) link
Hsve you met teens??
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 12 January 2021 11:25 (three years ago) link
Well the older they got the more exasperating it was.
― ledge, Tuesday, 12 January 2021 11:37 (three years ago) link
I liked Normal People although the book barely contained a 'normal' person. (Maybe that's her point! Makes you think.)
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, 12 January 2021 11:53 (three years ago) link
There are a couple hundred posted about them on the bbc thread iirc
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Tuesday, 12 January 2021 15:37 (three years ago) link
Covering McKellen: An Understudyās Tale by David Weston is a slightly ludicrous vanity publishing book written by a prim and fussy old luvvie about a disastrous world tour of Lear, but it does contain this ludicrous anecdote about jeremy paxman:Ian gives one of his finest performances to date, full of invention and spontaneity. After the show, I spot Jeremy Paxman waiting sheepishly among a group at the stage door to see Ian, like a small boy whoās about to meet Santa. Friday May 18th Ask Ian what Paxman thought about the production. Ian replies, acidly: āHe said it was great fun.ā Indeed, a strange comment to make on Shakespeareās greatest tragedy. Ian had only agreed to meet Paxman and his friends because Paxman had gone to the same Cambridge College, St Catharineās, and had said that Lear was his favourite play.great fun.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 12 January 2021 19:07 (three years ago) link
Thanks guys, I went to the library and checked out Normal People today, mostly to get out of the house, but also read a couple of favorable descriptions, but also that it's not quite as good as prev.---quotes to prove this seemed okay to me, out of context of course.
― dow, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 02:35 (three years ago) link
I would have started with the first, but second was all they had.
― dow, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 02:36 (three years ago) link
I'm reading a book of local Oregon history, Massacred for Gold, R. Gregory Nokes. It attempts to piece together as much as can be known long after the fact about a massacre of Chinese gold miners in an extremely remote spot in Hell's Canyon on the Snake River in 1887. Because the murderers were whites and the courts were essentially made up of their white neighbors in a very small community, this massacre was swept under the rug at the time.
So few verifiable facts have been preserved that a fair bit of the book is just laying the groundwork for understanding how racist the West was against Chinese, trying to get across how such a thing could have been covered up and excused by the "law-abiding" settlers who allowed the perpetrators to get off free.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 03:59 (three years ago) link
Add: the number of miners killed was either 34 or 31, making it the biggest mass murder in Oregon history by a large margin.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 04:01 (three years ago) link
MANHATTAN BEACH is readable, engaging, maybe rather like a film or a glossy TV series. The sense of period detail being plastered on can be strong, but I can't blame her, when period is a big part of the point.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 10:56 (three years ago) link
Garth Greenwell's Cleanness.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 11:10 (three years ago) link
Today's nugget from the FranƧoise Hardy autobio: she was super into Nick Drake and they hung out a few times but didn't talk much because of the language barrier.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 11:38 (three years ago) link
so it's not true about love being the universal language?
― koogs, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 12:10 (three years ago) link
Aimless, that book sounds very interesting.
― Pere Legume (the table is the table), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 12:13 (three years ago) link
― Next Time Might Be Hammer Time (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 18:47 (three years ago) link
The Stars down to Earth: The Stars down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture - Adorno
― Fenners' Pen (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 18:52 (three years ago) link
Pattern Recognition again, Gibson's last good book? Not SF, as such, but lots of contemporaneous references which dates it somewhat (she uses a phone card to make a call from a public phone box). Great turns of phrase (mirror-world for the tiny cultural differences between countries, children's crusade to describe Camden on a Sunday...).
― koogs, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 20:46 (three years ago) link
David Toop's Sinister Resonance. I'm only partway in, but Toop pulls a bit of an Of Grammatology trick here, arguing (against Berger) for the primacy of hearing over seeing as the primary mode of sensual awareness and orientation. His style is open enough that this doesn't come across as provocative as such - it's more suggestive than anything.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 20:56 (three years ago) link
(PR might also be my favourite book cover as well, the english hardback edition. and i bought it in a shop visible on the map on the front)
https://sciencefictionbookart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/pattern.jpg
― koogs, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 21:17 (three years ago) link
Part 2 of in search of lost time
― Fenners' Pen (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 13 January 2021 23:06 (three years ago) link
(Just remembered another tiny detail in PR that ages it but that is very evocative - he mentions the wooden escalators at Camden tube)
― koogs, Wednesday, 13 January 2021 23:54 (three years ago) link
I've begun The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, Herman Melville.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Friday, 15 January 2021 01:15 (three years ago) link
Finished Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, started The Aleph.
― Jimi Buffett (PBKR), Friday, 15 January 2021 01:57 (three years ago) link
Borges or the twitter mystic?
― wasdnuos (abanana), Friday, 15 January 2021 03:29 (three years ago) link
ā Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Thursday, January 14, 2021
It's got its longeurs, but whatta guy.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 15 January 2021 03:35 (three years ago) link
Borges.
― Jimi Buffett (PBKR), Friday, 15 January 2021 16:24 (three years ago) link
In the homestretch of xp Sally Rooney's Normal People. No major flaws that I've noticed so far, and having it in third person---unusual in contemporary lit, seems like---is refreshing: I don't have to get past the Unreliable Narrator's face x breath to find room for my own interpretations and/or the ones I'm led to, as the author flicks by the character's points of view---also, she can keep me in one protagonist's head and lifeline for quite a while, then the other's, or shift back and forth quickly. Which goes, for instance, with increasingly furious response of Marianne's mother and brother, seen only briefly so far, to her passive or impassive resistance (elsewhere, she's decided to become a submissive, seems to consider herself failing at that too, part of the internalized judgement of the increasingly "validated" scholar-to-?)Also: those who she eventually recognizes as users of, dealers in "friendship as social commodity"---as she's sometimes done herself, I'd say, but she comes to see them as doing it up front, in plain sight, once again giving herself a bad mark, this time for not noticing the obvious, despite being so proud of her brain (such a "good machine," as everybody knows, like when she wins the scholarship she doesn't need financially, being from what's tagged as a good family).
Insights, or gut knowns shifted into notes to self, don't nec. make things less painful, sometimes more:Back in fifth year when Connell had scored a goal for the school football team, Rob had leaped into the pitch to embrace him. He screamed Connell's name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance...And on Debs night, Rob showing them those photographs of Lisa's naked body. Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others...to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence...Connell couldn't judge him for that. He'd been the same way himself, or worse. He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful or confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible. Life was different after that; maybe he had never understood how different.
A few pages later:He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid.
― dow, Friday, 15 January 2021 17:35 (three years ago) link
Their friends seem like dabs, well-placed, but still. Maybe that's deliberate? The young and the restless, and "College is a bus station," declared drop-out Lester Bangs.
― dow, Friday, 15 January 2021 17:44 (three years ago) link
Penultimate bit's set-up well-planted, but then basis of change for ending seems a bit rushed, both segments now a little suspect, but not too bad. Will check first one because would like to see her writing be better incl. even better, because overall impression of this is still pretty favorable.
― dow, Saturday, 16 January 2021 16:42 (three years ago) link
I finished the collection of three Pascal Garnier short novels: The A26, How's the Pain, and Panda Theory. A26 is the darkest and most unconventional, though there is a decent amount of variety amongst the thematic similarities. Garnier is good at juxtaposing innocence and tenderness with senseless violence and nihilism, against the backdrop of somewhat shabby regional towns in France.
Now I'm reading Malicroix by Henri Bosco. It was published in French in 1948, but set in the early 19th century, and the story feels kind of 19th century gothic but filtered through a more 20th century psychological lens. It's good at describing being alone in somewhat inhospitable natural surroundings, listening to the wind and rain.
― o. nate, Sunday, 17 January 2021 03:28 (three years ago) link
"College is a bus station"
I like bus stations, and I romantically associate them with college, but otherwise the two don't bear much resemblance.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 17 January 2021 11:25 (three years ago) link
I made a Malicroix soundscape, need to find the link.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Sunday, 17 January 2021 11:55 (three years ago) link
xp Bangs went from high school in El Cajon ("The Box") to Grossmont Junior College in the same town, sold shoes and soon dropped out, sending a review over the transom to baby Rolling Stone, so for him it pretty much was a bus station, if nor bus stop.
― dow, Sunday, 17 January 2021 21:06 (three years ago) link
The campus in Normal People is oooo Trinity, but the hustle (incl. hustling bullshtters) and bustle and the main characters' discontent recalled what Bangs said.
― dow, Sunday, 17 January 2021 21:11 (three years ago) link
Arnold Bennet's 'The Card'
some mentions on ilb, but not many. most of his books are 1900 +/- 10 years so they've popped up in the recent polls, with 0 votes every time.
set in the potteries, which is the only reason i picked it up, but this one is more of a comic novel and less of the working class thing i wanted.
― koogs, Sunday, 17 January 2021 22:36 (three years ago) link
Read Lonely Christopher's upcoming chapbook after finishing the Dennis Cooper critical biography. Both good, wrote a blurb for the former and had a nice time doing so.
Finally getting around to Kevin Killian's Shy, a very difficult-to-find book by a sadly-departed mentor. Haven't been in the mood until now, and it's pretty brilliant about 20 pages inā lots of camp and play mixed with more serious philosophical underpinnings.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, 17 January 2021 22:43 (three years ago) link
Sounds intriguing. The book is making me fantasize about spending a week alone in the cabin in the woods.
― o. nate, Monday, 18 January 2021 00:00 (three years ago) link
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/custom.php?l=53451587537269743044&m=SLEDDOGS0~SLEDDOGS1~SLEDDOGS3~WIND4~STREAM5~STREAM5~STREAM6~STREAM6~STREAM7~STREAM7&d=0&title=Malicroix
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Monday, 18 January 2021 00:39 (three years ago) link
That's great! It would make a very congenial background soundtrack to reading the book. It's nice that you can adjust the levels too. I made the wind louder and the rushing water a bit quieter. It sounded more desolate to me that way.
― o. nate, Tuesday, 19 January 2021 02:07 (three years ago) link
Yay!
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, 19 January 2021 10:22 (three years ago) link
I picked up my Penguin Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and ended up reading all 12 stories. It'd be one of those books I could sort of convince myself I'd read over the years but nope, 90% of the stories were new to me and I enjoyed the shit out of them. If I had to pick 3, I'd say The Beryl Coronet, The Speckled Band (apparently Conan Doyle's favourite) and The Red-Headed League.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 22 January 2021 19:44 (three years ago) link
speckled band is an absolute banger
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Friday, 22 January 2021 19:47 (three years ago) link
Grimesby Roylott has to be one of the finest names in all of literature.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 22 January 2021 19:49 (three years ago) link
I love Holmes' suspicion of the countryside (I don't live that far from where the Copper Beeches would be and, well, he's not far wrong):
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.āāYou horrify me!āāBut the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkardās blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 22 January 2021 19:53 (three years ago) link
That's funny because I just was leafing through 'Adventures...' thinking I should read the whole thing. I've read maybe half of the stories.
I'm about 150 pages into Bleak House and 550 into Crime and Punishment.
― cajunsunday, Saturday, 23 January 2021 14:09 (three years ago) link
the tv series (Adventures) is on every day on itv4, around lunchtime. i think they've filmed every single one of them over the years, watched them all whilst unemployed the last time. (this week has Scandal in Bohemia, Dancing Men, Naval Treaty and Solitary Cyclist, Mazarin Stone and Dying Detective, Cardboard Box from Memoirs, and twice as many on catchup)
41% through bleak house (a reread after 8 years) but i've taken a month off.
― koogs, Saturday, 23 January 2021 15:19 (three years ago) link
There's one story where they just follow some footprints. I think it's "Boscombe Valley Mystery". All of the other ones are great.
― wasdnuos (abanana), Saturday, 23 January 2021 15:22 (three years ago) link
Are they the Jeremy Brett ones? From memory, they're great and he's the definitive Holmes for me.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, 23 January 2021 15:24 (three years ago) link
I finished Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade last night.
Much as I hate to fly in the face of esteemed ILBer James Morrison's love for this book, I found it heavy weather, more like an extended series of sermons delivered by characters who had more akin to allegorical sketches than any known human beings.
This, in itself, would not disqualify it from my love, but, alas, I found the sermons repetitive and their arguments insufficient to produce conviction in any direction. It felt as if Melville knew his philosophizing and allegorizing were too weak to persuade his readers by simple force of reason, so he compensated by amping up his eloquence to the highest pitch he could reach and battering the reader into submission through repetition. As his reader, this felt like a lack of kindness which was uncharacteristic of Melville.
In sum, it was a strange book, whose peculiarities are striking, but I didn't like how they struck me, and I ended up feeling more stricken than enlivened.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Saturday, 23 January 2021 18:31 (three years ago) link
I wasn't mad about it either, but it's weird enough to have kicked off a Melville phase. Redburn!
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 23 January 2021 18:50 (three years ago) link
Reading Ruth Wilson Gilmore's "The Golden Gulag"
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Saturday, 23 January 2021 21:50 (three years ago) link
Jonathan Lethem: THE FERAL DETECTIVE. Rereading.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 24 January 2021 11:20 (three years ago) link
I read Melissa Harrison's All Among the Barley. It has a lot on its mind: at once a bildungsroman, a study of clashing folk wisdom and modernity, folk horror via feminine psychosis and confinement, and a commentary on rural fascism in rural Britain in the 1930s. Harrison is predominantly a nature writer and the stitching that holds all this together is her observational eye and her clear love of the source material. It does sometimes fall away from the lyrical and the local, becoming trapped by the straitjacket of specialist vocabularies and research, but it's Harrison's control that keeps this compelling. It could (and maybe should, ymmv) have tipped into melodrama but it doesn't: the hints of witchcraft and secrets lead away from what could have been a Carrie or Kill List ending to something more subtle and upsetting.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Sunday, 24 January 2021 19:46 (three years ago) link
I finished Malicroix. It was interesting and odd, but I'm not sure it completely worked for me. I liked best the section where when the narrator is in a tenuous mental state driven by isolation and the need to feel some kind of spiritual connection to his deceased uncle. These were days in which not very much happens, though the narrator seems to be slipping in and out of some kind of mystical ecstatic state, eventually culminating in a kind of breakdown. I also liked the sinister figures of Dolmiol and Uncle Rat. The business about his uncle's will seemed more of a McGuffin, and I kind of lost interest the more those machinations took center stage. Not sure what to read next..
― o. nate, Monday, 25 January 2021 03:17 (three years ago) link
Book club pick: In Our Mad And Furious City, Guy Gunaratne. So far impressed with the stylized and urgent prose style but skeptical at its portrayal of London ends ruffness. We'll see.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 25 January 2021 11:30 (three years ago) link
raymond roussel - the alley of fireflies and other stories (spoiler: mephistopholes gets killed in the first story)
pynchon - bleeding edge (great beanie baby material)
yi sang - selected works (found the first poem so disturbing i shut the book and looked at the wall for five mins)
― dogs, Monday, 25 January 2021 13:36 (three years ago) link
I needed something soothing that goes down easy. I'm reading Hindoo Holiday, J.R. Ackerly.
― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Monday, 25 January 2021 15:51 (three years ago) link
All I seem to be reading this month are exclusively rereads, mainly of things I first read as a teenager, and I could stop myself from doing so but I feel like nostalgia this month tbh and so we go:Sex and the City (collected columns) by Candace Bushnell, read in conjunction with Glamorama by Bret Easton EllisThese two occupy the same space in my mind - they are both 90s New York (at least in part for Glamorama), there are mentions of some of the same locales and they even share one alias for a real person. CB even has an appearance in Glamorama! The SaTC columns are very different from the series; they are cold where it was warm, sharp where it was soft and extremely worth a reread any day of the week, imo. There are a few of the columns still online if you want to see what I mean; Iām interested to see that some of the names have been changed because they are different from the ones in my book! As a portrayal of a certain demographic at a certain point in time, thereās a lot to be said for the columns. Glamorama is a book of two very different halves, which appeals to me partly for this reason, partly because it is just relentlessly weird and Goes Places. I was trying to do a playlist of every single song mentioned or referenced in it but stopped doing it around fifty; in terms of how situated and embedded it is in its time itās pretty flawless. The plot? Still fucks me up, and there are several scenes that still are very difficult to read. I think I find the section on the QE2, short as it is, most fascinating because I know how it will end but the feeling of not knowing whatās happening and the sense of something bigger going on that is yet to be revealed is never better done during this section. Itās the line between sleep and consciousness when you see a shape just out of sight of the corner of your eye and know if you move it will reveal itself.Also dipped into Less Than Zero, which I am sort of disinterestedly rereading and tbh, donāt really like? Iāve never warmed to it at all. Also The Informers, an early short story collection, which is a lot better and is very sinister and sharp in places. I liked it a lot and still do.Then I had this craving for the Dark Tower series, so for reasons mainly unknown to me, I am now 70% through Wizard and Glass, a book I first read when I was 15 and loved instantly. Iām always judging people who say they hate it, tbh. The setting within the story is so well fleshed out in terms of characters and Rolandās early ka-tet is so compelling to read. This reminds me that I have the DT graphic novels about them, which Iāve never read and should! But the buildup to Reaping still stays with me even now and the sense of something thatās already lost without knowing it- too painful. I think Iāll read Drawing of the Three next.
― scampish inquisition (gyac), Wednesday, 27 January 2021 09:00 (three years ago) link
Raymond roussel's teh surrealistic writer who traveled teh world on ship but never left his cabin when the ship was docked isn't he?Writer of Impressions of Africa?
― Stevolende, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 09:44 (three years ago) link
yeah man, though i think he seldom left his cabin rather than never
started dodie bellamy 'when the sick rule the world' last night (i feel like ray smuckles shouting "this is a homeboy" whenever i read her writing)
― dogs, Wednesday, 27 January 2021 13:42 (three years ago) link
Dodie was my thesis advisor.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Wednesday, 27 January 2021 15:28 (three years ago) link
Paris Review is pitching a year's subscription bundled with three free New Directions novels:
Baron Wenckheimās Homecoming, by LĆ”szlĆ³ Krasznahorkai. Winner of a 2019 National Book Award, this sprawling story follows an exiled Hungarian baron who returns home at the end of his life. Krasznahorkaiās Art of Fiction interview appears in issue no. 225.
Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor. A literary murder mystery set in a world of myth and violence, in which a whole village is swept up in the hunt for answers. An excerpt of the novel appears in issue no. 231.
Macās Problem, by Enrique Vila-Matas. An unemployed sixty-year-old gets sucked into the habit of keeping a diary that begins to take over his life. Vila-Matasās Art of Fiction interview appeared in issue no. 234.
Are these books good?
Deal details and links to interviews (those of the three authors and a 2-part James Laughlin):https://mailchi.mp/theparisreview.org/new-year-new-directions-a-special-subscription-offer-136994?e=36a3a066a1
― dow, Thursday, 28 January 2021 03:05 (three years ago) link
The Bell Jar for the first time, believe it or not.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 28 January 2021 03:25 (three years ago) link
so good
― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, 28 January 2021 03:46 (three years ago) link
In a similarly 'believe it or not' moment, I'm reading the collected M.R. James for the first time. I started off scattershot (Casting the Runes) but now I'm going straight, front to back.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Thursday, 28 January 2021 08:38 (three years ago) link
A True History by Lucian Which has more illustrations by other people than it does by Aubrey beardsley though do like this guy William Strang.& hadn't realised how old the translation was, I'd assumed that Beardsley indicated it was Victorian but its a reprint of a version fro 1634.Anyway, now got something I've wanted to read for decades. & have seen the artwork of William Strang who looks like he may have influenced others possibly including Moebius.
― Stevolende, Thursday, 28 January 2021 08:52 (three years ago) link
PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, Annie Dillard. This is sooo great, mind and spirit expanding, like a funny, psychedelic Thoreau. Bought the Dillard anthology The Abundance a couple of years ago and didn't get on with it for some reason, but now I think I have to read everything she's ever written.
LOVE'S WORK, Gillian Rose. Another brilliant memoir/freeform essay about love, sex, poetry, dads, cancer, Judaism etc etc. Just finished a bracing chapter on colostomy bags.
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE, Andreas Malm. Love AM's casually dismissive ire, but this is a more forensic than it needs to be critique of XR pacifism and defence of direct action on SUVs/diggers/pipelines.
THE OVERSTORY, Richard Powers. Has been heartily recommended by a couple of friends, but though it's often beautiful, thought provoking etc, like all the Powers I've read, feels like notes for a longform New Yorker essay that have been fictionalised, rather than a novel as such... In the doldrums of the mid 200 pages and not sure I will finish :/
― Piedie Gimbel, Thursday, 28 January 2021 12:06 (three years ago) link
ha, the overstory was one of those things that has been recommended so many times (often in quite annoying ways) and iāve seen so many people reading (often in quite annoying ways) that i now absolutely refuse to read it. i realise this is not a healthy attitude.
― Fizzles, Thursday, 28 January 2021 12:28 (three years ago) link
loveās work is utterly wonderful.
xp never heard of it, going to read it just to spite you oppose this attitude
― scampish inquisition (gyac), Thursday, 28 January 2021 12:45 (three years ago) link
i have the overstory out of the library on recommendation from my brother but yeah i'm a bit skeptical, more so now because i don't usually like new yorker essays. i didn't start yet because i am reading the jakarta method. but i only have 21 days to finish the overstory so i guess i should start.
― superdeep borehole (harbl), Thursday, 28 January 2021 13:08 (three years ago) link
The Jakarta Method, a table recommendation, is terrific.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 28 January 2021 13:12 (three years ago) link
yes, i like it a lot. surprisingly fast and easy read given the subject matter, too.
― superdeep borehole (harbl), Thursday, 28 January 2021 13:15 (three years ago) link
xps
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is so damn good. Psychedelic is a great way to describe it. It's so freewheeling and euphoric. She sees into the heart of things. Her faith is kind of incidental, I think? It never gets in the way for me, at least.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Thursday, 28 January 2021 14:13 (three years ago) link
I really love this woman's explanation of her thesis, which was a visual study of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Really amazing details about blood!! http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/08/a-visual-approach-to-syntactical-and-image-patterns-in-annie-dillards-pilgrim-at-tinker-creek-essay-images-anna-maria-johnson/
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Thursday, 28 January 2021 17:22 (three years ago) link
I'm about two-thirds through Hindoo Holiday, but that's easily enough to allow me to evaluate its merits. It is excellent, in its own remarkably low key way. The entire book is a series of short vignettes, wherein he meets and converses with various people who are connected to his position as a maharajah's 'personal secretary', but actually he is a kind of mascot, having no defined duties but to live in a guest house and be a companion to the maharajah.
What makes the book special is partly the peculiarity of the people and events which are his subject matter, but mostly it rests on the great care Ackerly takes to avoid treating those people and events as exotic. They are just people, doing and saying things which are entirely natural to them, and his success in stripping away all hints of patronizing and exoticizing from his prose adds up to a kind of genius. Quite enjoyable!
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Thursday, 28 January 2021 19:32 (three years ago) link
Finished 'Golden Gulag' (highly recommended!)
Now onto poet kari edwards' 'having been blue for charity,' one of hers I haven't read.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Thursday, 28 January 2021 21:09 (three years ago) link
I should read Annie Dillard but she has terrible white person dreads and I think to myself "how can someone with hair so terrible have any insight into anything?" which I realise is incredibly stupid.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, 29 January 2021 00:43 (three years ago) link
Oh, shit, I'm wrong, I'm thinking of Anne Lamott; as you were.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, 29 January 2021 00:44 (three years ago) link
ha, the overstory was one of those things that has been recommended so many times (often in quite annoying ways) and iāve seen so many people reading (often in quite annoying ways) that i now absolutely refuse to read it.
I should read Annie Dillard but she has terrible white person dreads and I think to myself "how can someone with hair so terrible have any insight into anything?" which I realise is incredibly stupid....Oh, shit, I'm wrong, I'm thinking of Anne Lamott; as you were.
...
this is the content i crave
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Friday, 29 January 2021 19:18 (three years ago) link
i was reading table's favourite writer alexander chee on being in annie dillard's writing class and this was enough for me to get her book the writing life, which now I am reading*
*i read the epigraph from goethe and now it is in my reading queue, but it looks great. that's this 'reading' that you talk of, right? good enough for goodreads.
― Fizzles, Friday, 29 January 2021 19:22 (three years ago) link
I started Anna Karenina. I thought I was on a role with my 19th century doorstops so may as well give this a go.
― cajunsunday, Friday, 29 January 2021 20:45 (three years ago) link
There are some great passages, but in the last third I couldn't wait for the inevitable.
― Smokahontas and John Spliff (PBKR), Friday, 29 January 2021 21:25 (three years ago) link
I'm reading Symbols, Signals and Noise by JR Pierce, a gentle introduction to Claude Shannon's seminal work in information theory.
― o. nate, Friday, 29 January 2021 23:44 (three years ago) link
Price of salt by Patricia highsmith
not enough murders
― flopson, Saturday, 30 January 2021 00:50 (three years ago) link
I'm reading _Symbols, Signals and Noise_ by JR Pierce, a gentle introduction to Claude Shannon's seminal work in information theory.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 30 January 2021 11:57 (three years ago) link
That's interesting.
I finished rereading THE FERAL DETECTIVE. It's a good exciting story, and curiously original and distinctive. My doubt about it is the depth of admiration and desire that the narrator experiences for the title character. He is never made to seem interesting or attractive enough for that. Their whole relationship seems empty, in fact. The book would be better without it.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 30 January 2021 12:15 (three years ago) link
Back to MANHATTAN BEACH with a long way to go. She's just worn a diving suit for the first time.
I'm missing the wilderness, so I am re-reading the memoir of a wilderness guide who grew up in Alberta and guided in the Rockies: Tales of a Wilderness Wanderer, Andy Russell, published 1970. He knows how to tell an entertaining story/anecdote and has a deep fund of them.
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Saturday, 30 January 2021 17:34 (three years ago) link
Cool! Didn't you write a book about hiking?
― dow, Saturday, 30 January 2021 21:10 (three years ago) link
I didn't know this, and am now very curious.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Saturday, 30 January 2021 21:17 (three years ago) link
Download a book written by Aimless
You can d/l an epub of it from dropbox, but I disclaim any pretense to it being perfectly formatted. It should be readable enough, if you desire to read it.
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Saturday, 30 January 2021 22:06 (three years ago) link
Got it, thanks! Now I'm going out to walk much less challenging terrain.
― dow, Saturday, 30 January 2021 22:34 (three years ago) link
Me, too.
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Saturday, 30 January 2021 22:44 (three years ago) link
thanks Aimless!
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, 31 January 2021 00:25 (three years ago) link
brian! crazy <3
― mookieproof, Sunday, 31 January 2021 04:08 (three years ago) link
This is fabulous. Nicked a bunch of ideas for a lesson I'm going to teach on writing and motif metaphor at some point!
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Sunday, 31 January 2021 15:55 (three years ago) link
I have also utilized it in the classroom, Chinaski. It's really great.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, 31 January 2021 17:48 (three years ago) link
wd also recommend the v accessible introduction to said seminal work (the mathematical theory of communication) by warren weaver under the chapter title RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION and shannonās intro itself.
Thanks, I'll take a look at those. Pierce is an interesting writer and thinker in his own right. He's good at finding interesting angles and deciding what is the right amount of mathematical depth to capture a bit of the flavor of the work, without bogging down the non-specialist reader, and he seems to regard Shannon with something approaching awe. For instance, he uses the word "ingenious" to describe Shannon's experiment in which he determined that each letter in written English contains approximately one bit of information, although no one knows how English could actually be encoded that compactly.
― o. nate, Monday, 1 February 2021 04:13 (three years ago) link
keen to read the pierce myself. this is a great bit from the weaver intro:It is most interesting to note that the redundancy of English is just about 50 per cent, so that about half of the letters or words we choose in writing or speaking are under our free choice, and about half (although we are not ordinarily aware of it) are really controlled by the statistical structure of the language. Apart from more serious implications, which again we will postpone to our final discussion, it is interesting to note that a language must have at least 50 per cent of real freedom (or relative entropy) in the choice of letters if one is to be able to construct satisfactory crossword puzzles. If it has complete freedom, then every array of letters is a crossword puzzle. If it has only 20 per cent of freedom, then it would be impossible to construct crossword puzzles in such complexity and number as would make the game popular. Shannon has estimated that if the English language had only about 30 per cent redundancy, then it would be possible to construct three-dimensional crossword puzzles.
― Lord of the RONGS (Fizzles), Monday, 1 February 2021 13:08 (three years ago) link
I began Danielle Collobert's Murder, translated by NathanaĆ«l. Poetic micro-fictions, it seems, with Collobert's trademark bleakness intactā quite good so far.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Monday, 1 February 2021 17:17 (three years ago) link
I discovered Natasha Ginzberg. I finished Happiness, As Such and two of her novellas collected by NYRB.
Because I can't leave her alone, I started Spark's The Comforters, predictably insane and hilarious.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 1 February 2021 17:21 (three years ago) link
I want to take another shot at (this time succinctly as I can manage) describing The Professor's House: The Professor actually has two houses (subdividing in his head: "In my father's house are many mansions). In one, the old family home, he still comes to ruminate, perched way up in the study, where he finished his masterwork. He's always been isolated in his core, ripped from beloved backcountry to Civilization, but he went off to study and found a position in a small, insular college near enough to beloved lake. In Europe, he the intellectual aristo early glimpsed the cliffs of lifework, which he came back to the US West to write: a history of European adventures in said West, unflattering enough to further isolate him academically, although he has become marginally aware of younger historians here and there, beginning to glimpse their own ways forward in his.
But meanwhile, he also thinks about his other house, the new one built from masterworks proceeds and social ambitions of wife and daughter--daughter, the older one, has also inherited royalties from a marvelous invention, bequeathed to her by Tom, the Professor's best student ever, who then volunteered for and died in The Great War. The professor is increasingly troubled in mind about subsequent implications and developments, troubled also by interactions with increasing pressures of heiress daughter, who is pressured as well, in various ways (possible legal challenges ahead, by Tom's tech mentor etc, also some see son-in-law/business partner-regent as uppity Jew)The professor also draws out the minimal editing and writing intro for Tom's memoir of finding an abandoned cliff-dwellers' city much farther Southwest, and how that went over in D.C.Many mansions, much room, much echo, waves coming back. Style: wicked wit, sunset sorrows and beauty upside head.
― dow, Monday, 1 February 2021 21:42 (three years ago) link
Also, all this $ocial jockeying etc, and woolgathering, for that matter, will have been headed for the Crash of '29, something the author couldn't have known any more than her characters did in the early-to-mid 20s, but which makes it even better in hindsight, as she prob came to think (such a thought suits her persona)
― dow, Monday, 1 February 2021 21:50 (three years ago) link
The novel was published in 1925.
― dow, Monday, 1 February 2021 21:52 (three years ago) link
Of course everybody's always headed for a fall, but can be fun to see others headed that way.
― dow, Monday, 1 February 2021 21:54 (three years ago) link
Ultimately, while it's being read, gets very sad, though!
I picked up Crampton Hodnet, written by Barbara Pym in 1940 and published posthumously in 1985. It's not reaching her top of the line work so far, but it's not below her standard, as so many posthumous works tend to be.
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Friday, 5 February 2021 15:20 (three years ago) link
I just finished Jennifer Egan: MANHATTAN BEACH (2017).
A long historical novel that could be called old-fashioned - deliberately so. It feels as though Egan is trying to write a 1940s film in the form of a contemporary novel, though her long Acknowledgements mention texts but not film at all.
― the pinefox, Friday, 5 February 2021 15:36 (three years ago) link
I'm enjoying Muriel Spark's 'A Far Cry From Kensington'. pisseur de copie.
― cajunsunday, Sunday, 7 February 2021 10:31 (three years ago) link
Stanislaus Joyce: MY BROTHER'S KEEPER.
If you're interested in James Joyce, this is fascinating. Crazy that I didn't read it till now.
I enjoy the brother's truculent refusal to compromise: decades later, he's not sentimental about his father and condemns him as an awful, violent husband. Ditto 'Dante', the woman who lived with them, 'the most bigoted woman I have ever met'. Ditto Catholicism, which he starts to see through and tear apart from his teens (while being educated by Jesuits and reading around in theology), and still talks of with massive disdain in his sixties. The way he doesn't let a fake warm glow settle on the past, but insists on cool truth as he understands it, is very refreshing.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 7 February 2021 19:51 (three years ago) link
Canāt remember reading it either, had the impression it was just sour grapes.
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 7 February 2021 22:26 (three years ago) link
Preface by T.S. Eliot!
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 7 February 2021 22:31 (three years ago) link
i spent the better part of last year only reading dhalgren, which wasn't the plan, but my attention was so shot that... that's what happened. it was wonderful and i just finished reading, on table's recommendation, delany's heavenly breakfast, which functions as a short lovely memoir of commune living and a fascinating appendix to dhalgren itself; i lost it when the irl "scorpions" appeared
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Sunday, 7 February 2021 22:42 (three years ago) link
Preface by Eliot, Introduction by Ellmann. I highly recommend the book.
― the pinefox, Monday, 8 February 2021 11:47 (three years ago) link
Yeah, saw that about Ellmann. Intro and notes, I think.
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 8 February 2021 12:23 (three years ago) link
Brad, I'm glad you got something out of Heavenly Breakfast!
I finished Collobert's 'Murder,' and it was something else.
Now onto Kevin Davies' 'FPO.' Davies is a poet's poet, a sort of legend among followers of innovative poetry in North America, and it's been twelve years since his last book. This one sort of continues with what he does, but seems to lack an underlying purpose. As my friend put it, "it's still incisive and funny as hell, but seems directionless," and I'd agree. I'm still enjoying myself immensely, though.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Monday, 8 February 2021 17:12 (three years ago) link
I have about 80 pgs to go in Hari Kunzru's 'Red Pill', after a few friends raved about it. The first hundred pages have a "writer writing about writers (not) writing" vibe that grates, but it's picking up as a metaphor for alt-right internet trolls & black holes played out irl, or something.
Also reading Robin Kelley's very long bio of Thelonious Monk on an ilx recommendation, it's a little on the dry side but thorough, and there's a lot of good historical detail aside from the jazz stuff.
― change display name (Jordan), Monday, 8 February 2021 17:23 (three years ago) link
someone on tinder recommended jamie loftus' podcast about lolita to me so now i am rereading lolita. lol(ita)
"reread" is kind of a misnomer bc i've never finished it! i am excited to
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, 8 February 2021 17:25 (three years ago) link
Funnily enough it was, of all people, Patricia Lockwood who recently said something about LOLITA that I found quite simply perceptive and persuasive: namely that most of us mostly like the early part of it (the first half?), and don't much like it after a certain point (is it where Dolores runs away from Humbert, and Quilty becomes important?).
― the pinefox, Monday, 8 February 2021 18:12 (three years ago) link
i'm starting A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders and finding it to be exactly what I want to read right now.
― Joses Chrust (map), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:11 (three years ago) link
i have that on my nightstand but i need to read more of the stories it discusses first
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:14 (three years ago) link
hahaha i thought they were included, what a rip-off
― Joses Chrust (map), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:18 (three years ago) link
oh they are! posting before i even know what i'm talking about. this is the kindle edition ftr.
― Joses Chrust (map), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:20 (three years ago) link
just finished charles yu's 'interior chinatown,' which was good once i got the hang of the conceit (blurred lines between film/tv and reality). gonna start michael mcdowell's 'the elementals' next because i have a yen for horror at the moment. might finally read 'dracula' afterward.
― tiwa-nty one savage (voodoo chili), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:20 (three years ago) link
oh they're included? isn't one of them like 50 pages? i guess i should open the book at some point haha.
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:29 (three years ago) link
yes they all are. the first one is a chekhov which he's analyzing a page at a time.
― Joses Chrust (map), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:34 (three years ago) link
this year so far. bit of a rough start:
hamnet by maggie o'farrell - pretty good? thinking of william shakespeare as a real person was new to me, and that was weird i guess. it's sad when children die so the book was sad.
honourable schoolboy - low point for le carre. good on class (as per) and ex-pat HK. very bad on people who aren't white men. bit of a slog structurally.
how much of these hills is gold by c pam zhang - this got good reviews, but was just fine.
transit by rachel cusk - absolute banger. very funny. 5*
haunting of hill house - not scary enough
metamorphosis - good, at the risk of stating the obvious
the argonauts by maggie nelson - this was very moving
the arrest by jonathan lethem - i thought this was rubbish!
fatherland by robert harris - haha this was dreck
now reading:
mezzanine by nicholson baker (reread)
the deficit myth: MMT and the birth of the people's economy by stephanie kelton. i am completely ignorant of this stuff and this book is so convincing that i assume the argument is bad faith and straw men. but i like it so far.
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:37 (three years ago) link
is it in the cart? that's the only one i've read!
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Monday, 8 February 2021 22:38 (three years ago) link
I finished MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. Simply, for anyone strongly interested in the early Joyce, a priority. Fascinating.
I moved on to Peter Wollen: SIGNS & MEANING IN THE CINEMA (1969).
But as more of an indulgence I'm dipping in to Tom Gunning: THE FILMS OF FRITZ LANG: ALLEGORIES OF VISION & MODERNITY (2000).
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 9 February 2021 08:56 (three years ago) link
I'm slowly making my way through M.R. James' Collected and enjoying myself immensely. Also reading Modern Nature by Derek Jarman and working out what to (attempt to) grow this year.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, 9 February 2021 09:48 (three years ago) link
ā the pinefox, Monday, February 8, 2021 11:12 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink
hmmmm. the first half of lolita is really funny though? like the story of vera leaving humbert with the very taxi driver that picks them up is just hilarious. the arctic exploration is silly and could easily be excised but again it's kind of funny. i will say the reconstructed diary of his early days at the haze house runs a little long and is only revealing horrendous portions of humbert's character the reader has already glimpsed. (it's also sort of obviously a device for the device's sake, like here is a diary reconstructed from memory by an already-unreliable-narrator, lol, good luck parsing the projection from reality!!! - love, vlad) but that's nabokov, to me? iirc i abandoned lolita a few years ago bc even when nabokov narrators aren't total moral wastelands they are usually a little annoying and pretentious (in often very funny ways!) and i was between books and uncertain of what to commit to next and just didn't want to stick around with humbert as a narrator after charlotte died
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Tuesday, 9 February 2021 17:40 (three years ago) link
Always liked the movie, and saw maybe the last third of it again on TCM recently, from the point where they're on the lam and being followed and she keeps wanting to stop for snacks etc---think this part don't much like it after a certain point (is it where Dolores runs away from Humbert, and Quilty becomes important?) was compressed by Kubrick, with lots of veering momentum, still v. satisfying, though wonder if he changed it any, to make it more Crime Does Not Pay for guardians of movie morality---or maybe VN already did that,for publishers, mainstream crits, his Dean (he was still teaching, right?) ---haven't read the book.
Sarah Weinman, who put together the Library of America's domestic suspense anthology and multi-volume set---incl. In A Lonely Place etc., and leading to a publishing revival for Margaret Millar, wife of Ross MacDonald and just as good, from what I've read of her work---has since writtenThe Real Lolita, about the 1948 kidnapping case that supposedly was the basis of the novel, at least in part:Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Hornerās full story for the very first time. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.
Sally Hornerās story echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novelās creation, The Real Lolita casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic.āThe achievement of [Weinmanās] impressive literary sleuthing is to bring to life a girl whose story had been lost. ā ā Diane Johnson, New York Times Book Review
― dow, Tuesday, 9 February 2021 20:24 (three years ago) link
Crime Does Not Pay not that I would have wanted it to end in a more pro- or go-Humbert-go way.
― dow, Tuesday, 9 February 2021 20:26 (three years ago) link
I had no idea, or had forgotten, about a real 1948 kidnapping case. I had an idea that the book was more based on a literary precursor from, I believe, the 1920s.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 10 February 2021 10:00 (three years ago) link
I finished Crampton Hodnet. As indicated above, it was quite well done for a posthumously published early novel, but among the Pym I've read it falls among her lesser work. Pleasantly entertaining, but wanted a bit more mustard.
I'm now reading another light entertainment, Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Georges Simenon. It's a late production from 1970 and so far it feels a bit paint-by-the-numbers compared to the best Maigret stories. Not complaining. I'm in the market for soothing & easy books lately.
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Wednesday, 10 February 2021 17:36 (three years ago) link
Finished Ali Smith's Spring and Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner.
Gonna read a volume of Erin Belieu's poems and the new Adrienne Rich bio.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 10 February 2021 17:41 (three years ago) link
ā š šš¢šØ (caek), Monday, February 8, 2021 10:38 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink
yep. the second story is turgenev, "the singers". saunders goes on about how his students always grouse about the heavily descriptive style, how the action keeps getting interrupted by it, which .. i loved that and thought it was funny. sort of tired of the super streamlined modernist hemmingway approach tbh so i found that aspect refreshing - give me all your beautiful words! it's definitely my favorite story so far.
― lord of the ting tings (map), Wednesday, 10 February 2021 17:51 (three years ago) link
I have finally read 'The Nose' thanks to this book, but I have mixed feelings about Saunders' commentaries, which I will mull upon before sharing...
― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, 10 February 2021 19:26 (three years ago) link
What did you think of the Ali Smith, Alfred?
I tried some of Wallace Shawn's essays recently and found them kinda vacuous - to the point that I assumed I was missing something.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, 10 February 2021 20:15 (three years ago) link
I like teaching a few Saunders stories, but also find his whole public intellectual persona deeply annoying, for some reason. Was obsessed with him when I was in high school.
I am reading Jackie Wang's 'The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void,' which has some positives going for it: Jackie and I have existed in the same worlds of rad-left politics, punk rock, and academia for many years. In addition, my roommate from junior year of collegeā when I started posting on ILX, actually!ā did illustrations for the book.
That said, while the content is relatable and hits notes that I agree with, the poetry is formally uninterestingā mostly end-stopped lines and long prose blocks. The older I get, the more conservative I get about this pointā one of the basic units of verse is the line, and to eschew its use without good reason is to throw away one of the main tools available to a poet.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Thursday, 11 February 2021 22:16 (three years ago) link
My third novel. It took a bit through Autumn to get that discursiveness is her method, which means some of her arias work better than others.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 11 February 2021 22:18 (three years ago) link
Saunders just seems to do the same thing over and over these days.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, 12 February 2021 00:43 (three years ago) link
great post
― lord of the ting tings (map), Friday, 12 February 2021 00:50 (three years ago) link
the same thing over and over
who doesn't
― mookieproof, Friday, 12 February 2021 01:30 (three years ago) link
civilwarland is amazing but his work gets worse as it goes on imo, gets cloudy with sentiment
i still liked lincoln in the bardo anyway
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 12 February 2021 03:36 (three years ago) link
Lincoln in the Bardo was so good! I loved it
― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, 12 February 2021 04:00 (three years ago) link
Well, as a more specific example, he just had a story in the New Yorker about a disaffected confused guy working in some sort of weird amusement park. It's possible to suggest this is evidence he is going over the same ground repeatedly, but apparently this is not allowed.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, 12 February 2021 05:52 (three years ago) link
I finished Peter Wollen's SIGNS & MEANING IN THE CINEMA (1969).
Chapter One: Eisenstein. A quite vivid account of the origins of the 'montage of attractions' etc, but mostly a chronological account of SME's career. Unusual perhaps in being critical of him while still supportive.
Chapter Two: The Auteur Theory. This I wanted to read Wollen on. Mainly he talks about Ford and Hawks, in a 'structuralist' sort of way, ie: their films are structured around repeated oppositions. Perhaps, but it seemed limited. The idea of style hardly comes up. Then PW goes into an interesting long section on text vs performance throughout the history of art.
Chapter Three: Semiology of the Cinema. Basically a case for C.S. Pierce and his tripartite theory of signs as the best way to describe film. Subtle points here on how film signs can be indexical, iconic and symbolic all at once.
Conclusion (1972): This is odd. Wollen is in a totally different mood, talks about auteurism in a very different way, no longer has the subtle interest in types of sign. It's as if French Theory and a certain Dziga-Vertov-Group avant-garde have taken him over and made him a different thinker, in 3 years. He makes a big argument for 'modernism' as the model of textual communication, but seems to be making straw men of the opposing concepts. Godard is even more central here than he was at the very end of the 1969 edition.
― the pinefox, Friday, 12 February 2021 08:52 (three years ago) link
sp: C.S. Peirce.
― the pinefox, Friday, 12 February 2021 08:53 (three years ago) link
It's as if French Theory and a certain Dziga-Vertov-Group avant-garde have taken him over and made him a different thinker, in 3 years.
This isn't so surprising or unusual tho, in terms of film theory/practice in the post-68 period - things were moving fast! I think the basic text of Signs and Meaning is even older than 69 so pretty early in terms of semiotics/structuralism being applied to film; by 72, Wollen was far from alone in film theory or wider critical theory in revisiting and overhauling their thought - Robin Wood being perhaps the most notable example (Leavisite close reader to psychoanalytic Marxist-Feminist).
― Ward Fowler, Friday, 12 February 2021 09:11 (three years ago) link
JUst finished Angela Saini's INferior her book o Gender inequality. Qui8te like her work, Superior the one on Race Science is a must read.Hope there's more coming, have a couple of webinars by her on this to look forward to over next few weeks.NOw just wish I hadn't missed teh 2nd part of her BBC thing on Eugenics cos I can't find a d/ld that works.
Still working away at David Olusoga;s The World's War but have had another couple oif things I was working away at at the same time. Good book though. THink I could do with a book on a similar subject concerning WWII too though since this is all WWI.
want to read some Kehinde Andrews since I've been catching webinars by him.
Next up is probably going to be 1491 which I've been meaning to read for ages. 1491 picked I think to illustrate teh fact taht there were people who existed in teh world taht Columbus stumbled on for who that was just an incident in a continual timeline. THough 1491 is of course a Eurocentric timeline. I think his sequel 1493 explores the imapct of the discovery of teh New World on that of Europe.I started it a couple of months ago but then bought Inferior so read that first and then had a great delay in finisghing it. Xmas and teh like.
Read a bit of the Sword In The Stone last night where Wart meets Merlyn. That's another thing I've been meaning to read for years. Saw the Disney cartoon as a kid so decades. Not sure if it was all that time but has been a lot of it. Now have had teh omnibus copy I have for a year plus. Not spending enough time reading probably.
― Stevolende, Friday, 12 February 2021 10:48 (three years ago) link
Well, as a more specific example, he just had a story in the New Yorker about a disaffected confused guy working in some sort of weird amusement park. It's possible to suggest this is evidence he is going over the same ground repeatedly, but apparently this is not allowed. Yeah, aside from so-far uncollected New Yorker stories, the ones I've read wound up in Tenth of December, which gets predictable fast, esp. the overwrought (in detail as well as emotion) arias of pathos, and the disaffected etc. would fit right in. Some of the simpler ones are better, but even/especially among those, one is from the POV of a hyper kid and an old man with dementia, setting out from different points into undeveloped terrain, and you just know they're going to somehow bump into each other and have A Saunders Moment, looking at the sunrise and/or sunset, and that's what happens.Did like the one about the Middle Eastern Wars vet back in the States, wandering around, who gets into a brief conversation with some convenience store workers, and they're commenting on how marginalized, how forgettable such warriors have become for most civilians (and the media), over the years and years and years---later, seems like he might flip out, but gets re-absorbed into his family dynamic, at least for now, in a plausible way.Saunders as social realist! Wish he would do more like this, since it suits his talents/interests, and seems like, from the reviews, that he doesn't fuck around w historical basis of Lincoln At The Bardo, while still drawing on his imaginative powers, so will check that out.
― dow, Friday, 12 February 2021 18:57 (three years ago) link
And I do like some of his more risky ventures, but mainly, so far, having not read his novel, for socio-historical concerns/beefs/burns x contemporary literary rocket juice (descendants of Ralph Ellison etc.) I prefer Kelly Link, ZZ Packer, Karen Russell.
― dow, Friday, 12 February 2021 19:11 (three years ago) link
I like Saunders, especially the novel, but the mode where all protagonists are sincere, wide-eyed dumb dumbs gets old. The sci-fi dystopias as on-the-nose social commentary are still fun to read though, idk.
― change display name (Jordan), Friday, 12 February 2021 19:15 (three years ago) link
I'm finally reading Lorrie Moore (the one you think), and it's great.
― change display name (Jordan), Friday, 12 February 2021 19:16 (three years ago) link
I finished the Maigret novel last night. They're all quite short. I think Cather's Song of the Lark is at the head of the queue right now and it will get auditioned this evening, but I have a fistful of interesting books available and if the Cather doesn't grab me quickly she has some very strong competition lurking in the pile.
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Friday, 12 February 2021 19:18 (three years ago) link
I read Donald Davie's ESSEX POEMS: 1963-1967 (1969). A nice object, a book with line-drawing illustrations. The tone is bleak. Some moments in the poems hit home, but a lot of is rather oblique and obscure to me. It's curious to recall that Davie was grouped with the Movement, as these poems are much less directly communicative and obviously coherent than Larkin's. He draws on Pasternak (whom I don't know). He was also a Poundian, and I think I can see a Poundian touch somewhere here, for instance in the tendency to repetition that Larkin wouldn't have done.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 13 February 2021 10:44 (three years ago) link
ā change display name (Jordan),
Which?
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 13 February 2021 10:48 (three years ago) link
It seems to me that Moore peaked in the 1990s, with FROG HOSPITAL and BIRDS OF AMERICA; that before that, she was a bit brittle (SELF HELP), and after it, a bit unfocused (GATE) - but also that her talent is great enough and consistent enough that even the lesser Lorrie is better than the best of most other people.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 13 February 2021 11:17 (three years ago) link
I've read HOMER'S ODYSSEY (2006) by Simon Armitage. This version of the epic takes less than a day to read. It's brisk, communicative - in fact it's basically the script of a radio play. It doesn't contain that much obvious poetry, nor Homeric epithets. But it conveys a story well, makes certain things clearer to me, and delivers the encounters with the Cyclops and Sirens especially vividly (the Cyclops' dumb voice; the Sirens' circling song).
My sense is that the things that seem most exciting about the Odyssey (the encounters with particular monsters and threats) are things that Homer, or most versions, said very little about; and that most of the text is generally about relations between people - Odyssey, the suitors and other less interesting characters. If I'm right, it's odd that someone invented such vivid monsters and adventures and then made relatively little of them.
But the business with Eumaeus, the suitors, the scar, the bow, are all clearer to me now than they were before.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 13 February 2021 15:54 (three years ago) link
ā the pinefox, Saturday, February 13, 2021 4:17 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
i disagree with the latter half of this, i found bark mostly very bad, but otherwise yeah this is the progression. frog hospital still so great
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Saturday, 13 February 2021 15:59 (three years ago) link
Bark has "Wings," one of her very best.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 13 February 2021 16:21 (three years ago) link
Finished the Wang book, which got better as it went on and I got into the rhythms of it.
Read a journal with some friends' writing in it this morning, and going to read another issue in a little bit.
I've been reading Beddoes' "Death's Jest-Book" before falling asleep every night, and it's been having a funny effect on my dreams, which is kind of neat! I am enjoying myself immensely whilst reading it, tho I am usually a little stoned on good indica as I rest my head, so maybe that's it.
Late this afternoon, I'm picking up a package from a friend whose become a distributor for UK-based Face Pressā it's the SEVEN chapbooks by JH Prynne that they released during 2020. Cost me a pretty penny, but Prynne stuff is so scarce in the US that even if I don't like something, I can easily just keep it and sell it for an absurd amount of money in a few years. But I adore Prynne, so think I'll be okay with all of it :-)
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Saturday, 13 February 2021 16:50 (three years ago) link
halfway through Magda Szabo's Abigail. after the very emotional start, it's been in a bit of a rut, taking too long to go through the motions to bridge the major plot points.
gave up on The Hate U Give, everything was predictable. guess i'm not a young adult any more.
― wasdnuos (abanana), Sunday, 14 February 2021 01:28 (three years ago) link
ā the pinefox, Saturday, February 13, 2021 3:54 PM (yesterday)
i read emily wilson's translation of the odyssey recently. it was highly acclaimed when it came out and i can see why: it reads really well. even the bits that i had remembered being a little dull are easy to get through in this version. odysseus does emerge as a more interesting character (and more of a bastard, honestly) here than in other versions i've read. but this readability may have come at a bit of a cost. after reading it i went to look at reviews and found one by a classics scholar who complained that, by writing in shorter lines than homer (lines of about 10 syllables, as opposed to lines of 15 syllables in the greek), wilson had shortened the entire poem by a third! so, probably not the only translation anyone should read, but i wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone.
something that stood out to me in this version is that almost all of the famous fantastical adventures -- the cyclops, sirens, circe -- are told in flashback by odysseus, who is described by homer in terms that wilson chooses to translate as (for example) "the lord of lies" and "the master of deceit." in other words, it's at least possible that he's making it all up!
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, 14 February 2021 04:34 (three years ago) link
J.D.: yes on your last point - they're told to the court of the Phaeacians. There's a tale-within-tale structure here. I hadn't quite picked up on your thought, that it was invented. I did read a big LRB review of Wilson.
As a Joycean, I observe that this tale within tale structure doesn't really get transferred to ULYSSES, where we see most things first-hand.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 14 February 2021 09:47 (three years ago) link
ā (The Other) J.D. (J.D.),
Daniel Mendelsohn's book touches exactly this point.
― meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 14 February 2021 10:37 (three years ago) link
Donald Davie: PURITY OF DICTION IN ENGLISH VERSE (1952).
I think 'diction' here means something like: the vocabulary that a poet allows himself or herself to use, as appropriately poetic. I don't feel that DD defines it terrifically clearly, though as critical writers go he is quite clear.
I am not certain that I get the argument yet. I might only read the first half of the book. It's in an edition that also contains its follow-up, ARTICULATE ENERGY.
The main thing that one would notice about DD, like Empson, is his tremendous intimacy with the English poetic canon. Wordsworth, Pope, but also Gray, Goldsmith and a lot of poets now never mentioned. He knows them all and can summon them at will, like notes on his piano.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 14 February 2021 11:56 (three years ago) link
yeah, it is interesting that the monster part of the Odyssey is so short; agree that it's mostly a story about relations between people, but that's why I like it so much. There's such nuance and delicacy to his interactions with Nausikaa and to the way he and Penelope carefully re-establish contact after twenty years. That moment when Odysseus finally gets to Ithaka, and it's completely unchanged but he doesn't recognize it and everything looks strange to him, sticks in my mind more than any of the monsters.
― Lily Dale, Sunday, 14 February 2021 17:11 (three years ago) link
Really enjoyed the let's Talk About Myths Baby retelling of teh Odyssey. NOt getting as into the Aeneid but I think I have more webinars I'm watching at the moment.
Got further into the Sword iN the Stone. Wondered this morning where camelot was sourced from then foun dout thsi afternoon that it was from this The once & Future King source too.Surprised to see TH White was English or Rajish or whatever. I thought the tone indicated he was American. Quite enjoying it though or at least when I'm not wondering how much shorter an owl is than a hat because of description in it.
― Stevolende, Sunday, 14 February 2021 18:28 (three years ago) link
Today I've read 3/4 of Seamus Heaney's WINTERING OUT (1972).
― the pinefox, Sunday, 14 February 2021 19:20 (three years ago) link
Not getting as into the Aeneid
The Odyssey is more of an organic foundational myth establishing what it means to be culturally Greek, while the Aeneid is far more synthetic and derivative and the identity being established is political, imperial and hegemonic.
― Compromise isn't a principle, it's a method (Aimless), Sunday, 14 February 2021 20:16 (three years ago) link
pinefox, I thought of you the other day because I read this interesting article in LitHub about Ciaran Carson, a review of Heaney's North, and literary culture in the internet age. https://lithub.com/when-talking-about-poetry-online-goes-very-wrong/
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Monday, 15 February 2021 00:28 (three years ago) link
ā meticulously crafted, socially responsible, morally upsta (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, February 13, 2021 4:48 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink
Birds of America. I don't know why I waited to so long to read her (aside from the odd NYer story), given that she teachers here and I have a number of friends who have been students or worked with her.
― change display name (Jordan), Monday, 15 February 2021 01:08 (three years ago) link
yay! that book is perfect.
― horseshoe, Monday, 15 February 2021 01:45 (three years ago) link
I read two books this weekend that I'd attempted before and failed to stick with, The Left Hand of Darkness and Nightwood. Both, of course, turned out to be incredible. Nightwood was a fun Valentine's Day read.
― jmm, Monday, 15 February 2021 04:56 (three years ago) link
Table: I know of Carson's review way back, but not this latest discussion - thanks; sounds interesting.
― the pinefox, Monday, 15 February 2021 10:31 (three years ago) link
Reading the Saunders Russians book too. It's good! I suppose it's a testament his enthusiasm that I increasingly want to skip the Saunders bits to read the stories instead. It reminds me a little of the Hal Hartley short that made me want to read "Notes from the Underground" as a teenager.
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 15 February 2021 10:38 (three years ago) link
I finished WINTERING OUT last night. A lot of it is familiar but I'd never read the collection straight through. It's in two Parts, though the nature of the parts isn't made explicit. Is the second more about family?
My overall feeling, repeatedly, was the feeling I have registered before about Heaney. Namely that what his poems are actually getting it is often surprisingly obscure, and, in particular, the poems often tend to end on a mysterious, unresolved note. They're not even 'ambiguous' as that would seem to suggest hesitating between clear possibilities. Here, I often don't know what the point was and often can't be sure that a poem has ended till I turn the page and see that a new poem is starting. If asked for an example of all this, I'd say ... most of the poems. The exceptions are the ones that are clear and communicative.
If Heaney shows a consistent strength amid this, I suppose it's just texture: that line by line, he often has a sense of sound, of natural substances like earth, water, plants; a semantic or at least material richness. I'm not sure that he is often putting that in the service of any larger meaning, or if he is, I'm often not getting it.
A fact about Heaney, especially early Heaney, remains: the absence of 'modern' materials in the poetry - like, say, cars, radio, TV. What his poetry live with is, again, earth, roots, streams; things that might be hundreds of years old. There are exceptions to this, probably more so in later work, but consider the contrast with Auden & Spender as 'Pylon Poets' of the 1930s.
A few poems standing out:
* I love 'A New Song', where he seems to be occupying a gallant ballad form and filling it with beautiful words, names, sentiments, and a hint of insurgency.
* 'Gifts of Rain' I suspect is the most accomplished, major work in this book. It might seem to nod to larger things like 'history', but maybe it's more just about ... rain. Just a modern epic poem rendering the element: water, flood, soaking, in the fields and hills. I was in a seminar many years ago where the tutor got us to unpack how this poem worked, and it was a revelation. But I can't now remember what was said, or what I learned that day.
'The Tollund Man': here, at last, he seems to be saying something, pointing us somewhere, and the famous last stanza still stands as strong.
Not to forget the italicized poem on the dedication page, later adapted into 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing', and quite standing out from the rest of this book in its bleak, sardonic ... modernity!
― the pinefox, Monday, 15 February 2021 10:43 (three years ago) link
I then started Simon Armitage's translation (2007) of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT.
I like this, and I appreciate Armitage's work in making these old stories and poems accessible to us now. As far as I can tell, this book is much closer in length and dimensions to the original than his ODYSSEY was. It also picks up on what he says is an alliterative mode in the original, very thoroughly - that is, literally every line has 3 or more alliterations. A piece of formalism, if you like. He also brings out things like the richness of the feast and of Gawain's armour. I think this book is really good. I'm glad to have the chance to learn from it more about literary history.
― the pinefox, Monday, 15 February 2021 10:56 (three years ago) link
I'm about 2/3rds through Bleak House now. I was losing the plot a bit in the middle when 2 new characters seemed to be added every chapter - but its getting good now. Also: there was a spontaneous combustion which was pretty funny.
― cajunsunday, Monday, 15 February 2021 12:33 (three years ago) link
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier. First page: ok this is going to be heartbreaking. Tenth page: wow you incredible shits.
― ledge, Monday, 15 February 2021 13:46 (three years ago) link
(another one, like age of innocence, that i've read and can't remember a thing about)
― koogs, Monday, 15 February 2021 13:48 (three years ago) link
I finished the Symbols, Signals and Noise by JR Pierce. I liked the chapters on information theory itself better than the later chapters where he draws connections to other fields like physics, cybernetics, art and psychology. I feel satisfied that it did give me a better sense of some of them foundational work in the field. I'm always somewhat in awe of mathematicians who come up with novel and non-obvious proofs. Now on a much lighter note, I'm reading Code of the Woosters by Wodehouse.
― o. nate, Tuesday, 16 February 2021 03:06 (three years ago) link
Finished The Return of the Soldier, one of the incredible shits managed to turn herself around and gain some considerable compassion and the story was very moving; at the same time it's a brazen document of extreme classism, literally viewing the poor as "insect things", "repulsively furred with neglect and poverty", and not mere victims of circumstance but sour and squalid and ugly to their very marrow.
― ledge, Tuesday, 16 February 2021 20:18 (three years ago) link
I finish SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. Basically very good, helped by its seasonal, wintry flavour and its uncanny atmosphere. If anything the jovial last conversation between the two title characters, revealing the true identity of the lady in the castle etc, maybe undermines this and makes it less mysterious than it ought to be. The sense of sexual tension between Gawain and that lady, remarkable in such an old story, is also undermined by the assertion here that it was all a test cooked up by her and her husband, and that she's Gawain's aunt anyway (so maybe she was using magic to look young, as she was to make the Green Knight look green?).
As far as I know, Simon Armitage kept to a line by line translation so every line of his is a version of the original line. He keeps the alliteration extremely well. He sometimes uses anachronisms, which might sound a good idea, but might come out as pointlessly bathetic - 'just the job' (line 1856), 'mega-blow' (2343). But those are few. The translator also keeps stuff that a modern adaptation might get rid of, like the lament about women's tricks (page 110) and the ending, which culminates in 'AMEN' and 'HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE'; which I note means 'Shame on anyone who thinks bad of it', but has been left untranslated from whatever form of Middle French it was.
I recommend this book.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 17 February 2021 18:21 (three years ago) link
Oddly the Green Knight eventually gives up his real name, which is Bertilak de Hautdesert. This is oddly unclimactic as most people can't have heard of him outside this poem. His name on Google directs straight to Green Knight. Wiki says:
EtymologiesThe name "Bertilak" may derive from bachlach, a Celtic word meaning "churl" (i.e. rogueish, unmannerly), or from "bresalak", meaning "contentious". The Old French word bertolais translates as "Bertilak" in the Arthurian tale Merlin from the Lancelot-Grail Cycle of Arthurian legend. Notably, the 'Bert-' prefix means 'bright', and the '-lak' can mean either 'lake' or "play, sport, fun, etc". "Hautdesert" probably comes from a mix of both Old French and Celtic words meaning "High Wasteland" or "High Hermitage". It may also have an association with desirete meaning "disinherited" (i.e. from the Round Table)
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 17 February 2021 18:25 (three years ago) link
Last night I started Dante's INFERNO, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. (Is this still the most read English version?) Her very long introduction was rather off-putting, so eventually I skipped to the poem. I found that I was able to read it.
A question arises, for me. When people say (as Sayers, and everyone, does) that Dante is sublime and wonderful, do they mean the poetry, specifically, in Medieval Italian (the eloquence of the vulgar)? But if so, most people in England can't read that (unless there's more continuity with modern Italian than I realise). Eliot said, I always recall, that he liked reading Dante in Italian even though he didn't know Italian. As though it was an instance of 'pure poetry', 'pure sound' or the like.
Or, do they mean that it's sublime in translation? In which case, presumably the translation matters? (I'm interested in Alasdair Gray's.)
Or, do they mean that the content is sublime: the journey with Virgil, Beatrice and so on? Here I'm more doubtful. I sense that how you respond to the material depends somewhat on your own predispositions.
This isn't, by the way, to suggest that 'everything is always lost in translation'. Kafka, Brecht and, a bit differently, Beckett (from French to English) are sublime in translation.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:09 (three years ago) link
I also continued with Donald Davie's PURITY OF DICTION IN ENGLISH VERSE. A chapter on syntax suddenly arrived at hair-raising conclusions about Ezra Pound - the kind of thing that you find you've seen quoted elsewhere before, but are suddenly encountering in the original:
"the development from imagism in poetry to fascism in politics is clear and unbroken" (p.86).
Davie, a great Poundian, ought to know. But maybe the sentence is deceptive, in that it really only refers to EP, but Imagism actually involved a lot of other people, most of whom did *not* share his political trajectory. As a statement about EP, it is almost tautologically true, but as statement about Imagism as an aesthetic, it's unproven at best.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 18 February 2021 11:13 (three years ago) link
Started on the Third Ear Band book when I couldn't sleep last night. Not really looked in it before. It has a lot of released text from various sources reprinted. Magazine articles and interviews and things. Most of it pretty interesting. IT does have a new chronology that i don't think has appeared before.& the cd that came free with the book is really good. Not sure how well it represents the tracklisting on an unreleased lp by the Electric Ear Band cos it runs pretty short. BUt it is pretty consistently good and some of it has hypnotic groove to it.
Wish there was recording o the Hydrogen Jukebox the electric band that had its gear stolen which begat the acoustic Third Ear Band . There is some later material recorded towards teh end of teh 70s under the name apparently which might be interesting in itself.
Also picked up 1491 and read about a chapter. Interesting stuff. Author starts teh main part of the book looking at the Mayflower separatists relationship to the native Americans local to where they are trying to set up a colony and what agency there is on the Native side which has been overlooked for centuries. like there were pull factors to them helping these white folks out they weren't simply being used instrumentally. Which was a portrayal they had for a couple of centuries at least, merely being pawns to white agency.
Still working away at the David Olusoga book Thew World's War about the colonial involvement in the First World War or back to it after having the last Ugly Things fulfilling the same role. Want to read some more Olusoga and would like to hear about similar roles played by colonial troops in WWII too. I think there was more recognised involvement though racist attitudes remained.I think memorial monuments etc were still as hard to come by for the non caucasian elements of the armed forces.
― Stevolende, Thursday, 18 February 2021 12:02 (three years ago) link
For reference:
Heaney translated the start of the Divine Comedy:https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-05-23-bk-38605-story.html
Alasdair Gray did finish his Dante:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/24/paradise-dantes-divine-trilogy-part-three-by-alasdair-gray-review-a-fitting-finale
I'd like to read that.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 18 February 2021 16:04 (three years ago) link
Finished Commodore by Jacqueline Waters, a book sent to me as part of a thank you for a gift I made to Ugly Duckling Presse. Had never read her work before, and was quite surprised by how much I loved it. Strange, observational to the point of slipping into stand-up realm at moments, pointedly critical of certain structures of capital...nice book.
― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Thursday, 18 February 2021 16:45 (three years ago) link
I read Clive James' translation most recently, pinefox.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 18 February 2021 16:51 (three years ago) link
have about 100 pages left in lolita and i'm well into the half of it i've never read before; it never stops being lightly comic, mostly bc humbert's small and large misfortunes are so ironic and deserved that i can't help laughing at them and at him. he's such a pretentious shithead and misanthrope. but also the second half of the book is genuinely the most horrific part, pretty much nonstop sexual abuse either alluded to or directly described (i most wanted to throw up when he forces her to give him a handjob in her CLASSROOM)
the lolita podcast i've been listening to dwells extensively on the cultural misinterpretation of the book, and reading it... it's hard to not notice that the only time dolores seems interested in humbert is when she thinks it's a game, a kind of adult performance/play that she's attracted to because she's a child who longs to be an adult and is in a frustrated purgatory between the two, but from the moment humbert first rapes dolores it is 100 percent clear she is 1) dealing with extensive ptsd 2) constantly trying to escape him. when she suggests they go on the second road trip and is suddenly sweet to him, it's clearly a manipulation meant to foster her escape (which, to some degree, her future abuser, clare quilty, is designing, which is the sad and fucked up dead end of this book, that she can only escape her abuser by running off with another pedophile, but she displays such cunning in this section of the book that it feels like she's discovering her own agency anyway)
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 19 February 2021 19:11 (three years ago) link
(at least as much agency as she can possibly have in a society that routinely sexualizes her, violates her, and then discards her)
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 19 February 2021 19:18 (three years ago) link
read 'the daughter of time', which is breezy and well-written and quite convincing about richard iii's innocence
otoh JT kind of showed her ass with the insistence that (a painting of) richard's face demonstrated his nobility. and her examples of famous false historical events seems to lean oddly toward the people with actual power being 'not that bad'
― mookieproof, Friday, 19 February 2021 23:51 (three years ago) link
She does that face thing all the time. If someone has light blue eyes, dark blue eyes, oddly-set eyes or a haunting resemblance to a person or animal that you've met earlier in the story, you know they're a murderer or at least a pathological liar.
I still really like her books, esp. Brat Farrar and The Singing Sands. She also convinced me about Richard III, even though I don't trust her at all.
― Lily Dale, Saturday, 20 February 2021 00:18 (three years ago) link
Brad, Kubrick's screen version doesn't end the way you seem to be expecting the book to end---don't know how the book actually ends, since I still haven't read it (see my posts upthread re last 1/3 of Kubrick's treatment, and the recent book about the supposed real-life basis of the novel).
― dow, Saturday, 20 February 2021 01:51 (three years ago) link
i haven't seen the kubrick film yet but i do know that it ends differently (dolores doesn't die, for one)
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Saturday, 20 February 2021 02:05 (three years ago) link
but she does run off with quilty
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Saturday, 20 February 2021 02:06 (three years ago) link
Donald Davie, ARTICULATE ENERGY. On the question of how syntax works in English poetry and whether it's good for poems to be syntactically proper. DD tends to think so, more than many modern poets would do. It's a good bracing perspective. His chapter on Fenollosa has clarified Fenollosa a bit for me, but I'm still not sure how far I really get Fenollosa, or agree with him.
DD in his later statements can say things like 'that hideous decade, the 1960s', which go too far into indiscriminate 'conservatism' - where I suspect more care is needed.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 20 February 2021 14:07 (three years ago) link
Prynne on Davie:
Davie wanted very much to be a poet. I think he probably knew in his heart of hearts that he actually wasnāt a poet, though he cared enough about poetry to commit himself to substantial efforts to develop some way of Āexpanding his own writing practice. He was part of that Movement group of poets who wrote very defensively and traditionally...
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Saturday, 20 February 2021 15:41 (three years ago) link
Davie always writes very highly of Prynne.
What little of Davie's poetry I have read hasn't done a huge amount for me; but then the same is true of Prynne's.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 20 February 2021 16:43 (three years ago) link
I was mostly interested in it because I knew Prynne was Davie's student, but have always found Davie's poetry to me just utterly useless.
Prynne, on the other hand...
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Saturday, 20 February 2021 22:26 (three years ago) link
Has anyone read E. NESBIT?
― the pinefox, Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:01 (three years ago) link
yes.
― Lord of the RONGS (Fizzles), Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:06 (three years ago) link
she apparently had a very interesting life. Was she a socialist like H.G.Wells and people.Anyway heard some unexpected backstory to her possibly in a review of a biography of her in a Guardian review or something.
― Stevolende, Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:08 (three years ago) link
I consider reading a book by her called THE PHOENIX & THE CARPET. If I can find the copy I have already mislaid.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:28 (three years ago) link
itās v good. sequel to Five Children and It. V much of that long Victorian quasi mystical/pastoral/arts and crafts space world.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:52 (three years ago) link
space
― Fizzles, Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:53 (three years ago) link
Fully automated luxury Victorian quasi mystical/pastoral/arts and crafts gay space comunism world.
― ledge, Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:56 (three years ago) link
the best world.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 21 February 2021 11:56 (three years ago) link
That feels as good a place as any to say that I finished Jarman's Modern Nature. It's a beautiful book in many ways, with the garden at Dungeness an extraordinary project to take on. But the garden becomes something closer to a figure for Jarman's fight against the entropy of his AIDS diagnosis and a refuge from the useless, flailing rage he feels at the Thatcher government. His recording of its coming into flower also allows for a flowering of memory - particularly to his painful childhood. He was always incredibly productive but the amount he continues to produce (the diary, the garden, the film work, the paintings, the cottage, which in itself functions as an installation) is staggering.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Sunday, 21 February 2021 13:07 (three years ago) link
reminded me to check on the campaign to save his garden which seems to have succeeded. maybe because iāve always been drawn to the dungeness, dymchurch, and rye landscape a single viewing of the garden back when i was a teenager created a disproportionately large imaginative imprint so that i will find myself thinking about it when i wouldnāt have said it was either particularly important or significant to me.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 21 February 2021 14:46 (three years ago) link
I've always wanted to visit that area; I keep thinking about doing a walking tour of it or something after the pandemic is over. I have a beautiful old naval map of Romney Marsh on my wall but I've never been there.
RE: E. Nesbit: The Enchanted Castle is amazing imo. The Story of the Amulet, the last book in the Five Children and It trilogy, is marred by a hideously antisemitic chapter but is otherwise brilliant. The Railway Children is pretty good but the movie adaptation from 1970 is even better.
I wrote my undergrad thesis on Nesbit, Kipling, and The Jews, ask me anything.
― Lily Dale, Sunday, 21 February 2021 17:00 (three years ago) link
Finished a re-read of Daniel Davidson's brilliant 'culture,' a life-work published only after his death. Truly one of the best poets of his generation, taken too soon and at a most inopportune time, too-- before the internet could really do a good job of celebrating and archiving, but after the most active and bubbly period of little mags and so on.
Today I'm reading workshop poems from various people and a long chapbook from Jason Morris, 'Low Life.'
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Sunday, 21 February 2021 17:09 (three years ago) link
Lily Dale, I think I thought you were American - probably from your being such a Springsteen expert.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 21 February 2021 17:31 (three years ago) link
I am American! Just got raised on classic British children's lit.
― Lily Dale, Sunday, 21 February 2021 17:36 (three years ago) link
I'm quite glad to have that piece of reality confirmed.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 21 February 2021 17:40 (three years ago) link
I picked up THE LATE AUGUSTANS ed. Donald Davie and read a couple of poets.
Thomas Gray: 'Elegy, written in a country churchyard' (1742 or later). This poem is only 6 pages long, 32 quatrains. I thought I knew it but today I'm afraid I realised I had never read it from end to end. It starts by depicting evening falling in a village; the poetic speaker looks at the graves of the poor and considers them virtuous for never having been rich, but also considers that they may have been great talents that were never known: 'mute inglorious Miltons'. What I'd not recalled was the later section where he rather self-indulgently or morbidly imagines his own death and, like Yeats in 'Under Ben Bulben', writes his own epitaph (3 stanzas, where Yeats's was only 3 lines).
I think there is one social or political ambiguity about the poem, namely: is it giving fresh attention and dignity to the lives (via the deaths) of the unknown poor? Or is naturalising their obscurity, in the lines around 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen'? It was William Empson, perhaps in SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL, who made the political criticism, and I have an idea that Raymond Williams for instance later agreed.
I tried Samuel Johnson's 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' but couldn't be bothered to go far with it - so over to Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Deserted Village', a poem I've meant to read for some time due to Goldsmith's importance in Irish literary history.
Fizzles, your recommendation is welcome: I'll try to read Nesbit.
i spent the weekend mornings, the time i do most of my reading, looking through all the alternatives we've been talking about in that other thread, reading intros and pretty much rejecting them all. 5 pages on the typists involved in converting the Lady Chatterly manuscript to a copy for the printers, 5 pages on why we need another translation of War and Peace, the first chapter of Small House at Allington (which broke the 4th wall too much), intro to the Grand Meaulnes about how even the title is a pain to translate, three pages of the Three Musketeers (a page each)...
and wasn't in the mood for any of them, or anything else, but i've got a week before i need to choose.
my kobo has decided it's going to show the cover of War and Peace when i snooze it regardless of whether that's the last thing i was reading or not. maybe that's fate (cover is terrible generic penguin screen, just the title and author and a penguin logo with a thick black border)
― koogs, Sunday, 21 February 2021 19:08 (three years ago) link
I keep meaning to read The Magic Mountain, maybe you have already read that one?
― Lily Dale, Sunday, 21 February 2021 19:17 (three years ago) link
I never read intros before I read the book.
― ledge, Sunday, 21 February 2021 19:52 (three years ago) link
Introductions vary tremendously in quality, length, and intended purpose. It's usually a simple matter to quickly suss out whether reading it will be an exercise in tedium, or the equivalent of being socially introduced to a remarkably talented stranger by a mutual friend.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Sunday, 21 February 2021 20:04 (three years ago) link
i was careful to avoid the spoilery intros, these were more the translators notes or the 'notes on the text' about the various editions over the years. Chatterly was interesting in this respect (private italian edition with tons of errors because of language barrier, the two different paper stocks they used, the first typist who kept 'fixing things', later typists who used different punctuation conventions, the different ribbons they used!, pirate editions, expurgated editions for copyright purposes)
― koogs, Sunday, 21 February 2021 20:05 (three years ago) link
Another vote for E.Nesbit. Can't find my original post, but here's the one I read, my Mom's copy of Five Children and It, the Puffin edition, intro by Roger Lancelyn Green, who nails the appeal:...The trouble with most grown-up people is that, although they may remember some of the things they did when they were children, they cannot remember what it felt like to do them, nor how they thouhgt about them at the time. The other end of the trouble though many of us can think of the most wonderful imaginary adventures, we never know then how to pick and choose and arrange our own stories, nor to write them down in such a way that they can mean to other people even one tenth of what they mean to usHe then describes the roundabout way she came to her gift: married "very young," soon had several kids and a seriously ill husband, "robbed by his partner, like the father of the Bastables." (So her sense of childhood anxieties rang the truer for grown-ups in the same boat, or too near). To support them, she threw herself into writing for grown-ups, but not very well, says Green, and the same was true when she tried children's magazines, until an editor asked her to try putting a book together, and then only near the end did a line, and image, provide a turning point.Five Children and It has the Bastable kids mysteriously home alone in the country one summer---well, there are a few servants, and the "cottage" is pretty swanky to us proles, but they're at loose ends, wandering around with their distinct personalities and group dynamic, 'til they encounter a critter which they recognize as a fantastical breed in their books, so they pester him into reluctantly granting their wishes, which of course always have unforeseen side effects, which can get pretty wild, and I think (don't have more time to spend looking back through it) *may* incl. some flashes of xenophobia, not that unexpected in 1902.Also read an intriguing review of a Nesbit biography, when it was published a few years ago: she became maybe the center of a salon, or those English Country weekends at least, known for her warmth, wit, and beauty (so yeah prob on xpost HG Wells' radar).
― dow, Sunday, 21 February 2021 22:15 (three years ago) link
Also, Nesbit's ghost stories are fucking awesome.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Sunday, 21 February 2021 23:50 (three years ago) link
Was confused because I thought you were talking about the Florodora girl Evelyn Nesbit.
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 22 February 2021 00:49 (three years ago) link
Oh yeah, she did that too. Very versatile.
― dow, Monday, 22 February 2021 02:27 (three years ago) link
Had to feed the family, you know.
In THE LATE AUGUSTANS I read Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village' (c.1770). Where Thomas Gray 20-30 years earlier talks of a local village (or even hamlet) as a quiet, unchanging place of serene repose, Goldsmith posits such a village as subject to disastrous social change. Discussing a fictional called AUBURN (he always uses capitals!), he contrasts an idyllic memory of the place as one where games were played and ale was drunk, with a recent history of economic decline and depopulation. I was quite struck by the emphasis, late in the poem, on emigration - to America? - which makes the poem seem much more likely to be referring to Ireland than England. (Or do I underestimate English rural emigration to America in the period? This is all long before the biggest Irish famines.) Here he imagines not just people but also abstract 'rural virtues' taking ship:
I see the rural virtues leave the land:Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail,That idly waiting flaps with every gale,Downward they move, a melancholy band,Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand.
Goldsmith proceeds in rustic style describing the kindly parson; the knowledgeable schoolmaster, whose learning the yokels can hardly believe; and the pub where people drank nut-brown ale. What has caused the damage? Goldsmith refers to 'trade', suggesting what we might call capitalism. Perhaps this is also somewhat 'globalised'. He also seems to point to simply inequality, between luxury and poverty; rich people take up too much space and resources and starve the poor.
But times are alter'd; trade's unfeeling trainUsurp the land, and dispossess the swain;Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose,Unwieldy wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose.
I feel that this is a poem that asks you to consider it as a real argument, that gestures to an actual history. But I don't know enough of the real history to know how far it's more complicated than what Goldsmith says; if what he says is too simplistic or tendentious. Nonetheless it seems like the strongest work of direct social criticism I have read from the poetry of the era. I add the observation that Goldsmith seems, in this limited and specific way, a precursor to Blake.
― the pinefox, Monday, 22 February 2021 11:34 (three years ago) link
I then started on a Penguin book marvellously called THE EARLIEST ENGLISH POEMS, ed. Michael Alexander (1966) and dedicated to ... Ezra Pound!
The book translates Old English into modern English. But it takes on the form that we often think of as old English, rather than being 'modernised' the way, eg, Simon Armitage does with GAWAIN. It's actually very close at times to Seamus Heaney, clarifying slightly for me how much he was trying to draw on this tradition. Even 'word-hoard', I now see, a favourite Heaney phrase, is a translation from Old English.
I've skipped most of the introductory material and straight into the poems, starting with a fragment called 'The Ruin'. It describes a Roman ruin, apparently perhaps Bath, as seen by an Anglo-Saxon after the Romans' departure.
Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,high, horngabled, much throng-noise;there many meadhalls men filledwith loud cheerfulness: Wierd changed that.
'Throng-noise' is precisely the kind of term Heaney uses (not just in BEOWULF). The weird-looking word 'wierd' turns out to mean 'what is, what happens, the way that thing happen, Fate, personal history, death'. That seems to cover most things.
I also read the testimony of the poet Widsith, which mostly just lists different European tribes; and 'Deor', which seeks comfort by recounting bad events then saying 'That went by; this may too'.
― the pinefox, Monday, 22 February 2021 11:47 (three years ago) link
I used to have that Gray poem memorized. Took a quarter-long class as a junior in high school on "Politics in British Poetry" which was taught by a PhD candidate at Yale. He was an awful teacher, but I did get exposed to Marvell, Gray, and Clare, among others, at a quite early age for a USAmerican born in the early 80s.
I'd venture to say that Clare is among the most important poets for me, particularly as regards the politics of his work.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Monday, 22 February 2021 17:51 (three years ago) link
I like the turn toward poetry this thread's taken.
"...Churchyard" made an impression on young me, and, as it happened with the Bible, I was surprised when I'd see how popular discourse had absorbed bits of the verses. I like how this era of English poetry could wax philosophical in a languid just-thinkin'-about-things way that would disappear after Shelley, Wordsworth, and, later, Arnold.
I had a helluva 18th century Brit lit professor who taught me to love Pope, still do.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 February 2021 18:04 (three years ago) link
I'd venture to say that Clare is among the most important poets for me
I discovered Clare in the late 1970s, but only because I was haunting libraries and digging on my own as deeply as I could into poetry. No one paid him any attention at that time. I place him high, too.
Pope is such an odd duck. I love/hate his work in about equal parts. He formalizes everything into a kind of perfection, and that formal perfection includes his worst habits, too.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Monday, 22 February 2021 18:33 (three years ago) link
the rat-tat-tat relentlessness of the heroic couplet can prove exhausting, but I cans still read Windsor-Forest and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot with pleasure.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 22 February 2021 18:36 (three years ago) link
i finished lolita! good book
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, 22 February 2021 19:04 (three years ago) link
Aimless, you might like one of Clare's biggest contemporary fans, Peter Culley. He passed away in 2015, but his Hammertown trilogy is really lovely postmodern take on "the walking poem." Sort of like if Clare had been witness to the rapid suburbanization of Vancouver Island, in particularly the city of Nanaimo. One of my favorite poets, and he works mostly in verse forms, too!
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Monday, 22 February 2021 21:04 (three years ago) link
ty, ttitt. i'll look into him.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Monday, 22 February 2021 21:07 (three years ago) link
i am now embarking on dennis cooper's george miles cycle, starting with closer
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Monday, 22 February 2021 21:10 (three years ago) link
FWIW Iain Sinclair also wrote a contemporary walking appreciation of John Clare: EDGE OF THE ORISON (2006). As I understand it he connects his own name with Clare's.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/546/54613/edge-of-the-orison/9780141012759.html
It occurs to me that I should read that book, if I didn't have so much else to read.
― the pinefox, Monday, 22 February 2021 22:51 (three years ago) link
I love Edge of the Orison. I mean, it's peak Sinclair (obfuscatory, self-indulgent, digressive) but it's got a peculiar energy. I think about it often.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Tuesday, 23 February 2021 10:03 (three years ago) link
Breaking up the erudite discourse here for another two bits of vapid celeb gossip courtesy the Hardy autobio:
a) Jacques Dutronc was supposed to be in Raiders Of The Lost Arkb) Serge Gainsbourg tried making a movie in the early 80's and had Robert Mitchum, Alain Delon and Dirk Bogarde all turn him down for the lead role
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 23 February 2021 12:01 (three years ago) link
Lol, somehow I thought you meant a Thomas Hardy bio.
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 23 February 2021 12:24 (three years ago) link
I enjoy those mid-century poets - Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Thomson - in a slightly cold way, like I read and look at say Gray's personifications bumping around or the careful ethical language sliding into passions or trying for bardic wildness and think 'interesting', but I've never really loved them.
I've been thinking about Pope a bit over the last year. I made this sometime last spring:https://twitter.com/autoduncebecause all those neat and tidy couplets seemed a good fit for twitter. It's been fun to watch it run. There's been something a bit queasy about watching the pope-machine at work, rhyme by rhyme, but it's now made it through to the stuff I love - Moral Epistles and Imitations of Horace, with the Dunciad to come - and I marvel at what he pulls off, over and over, inside the heroics.
― woof, Tuesday, 23 February 2021 12:29 (three years ago) link
T^he first 2 books by Steven h gardner turned up yesterday. Or that is in the Punk related series Another Tuneless racket.So I read his article o Rocket From The Tombs which had appeared in Big Takeover in a slightly different guise in 2004, not sure if I saw taht at the time it came out. Quite good anyway. So looking forward to reading through the rest of this.Seem to be quite well written anyway.
& cover a lot of bands I half know about and a few that I don't really know much about
2 volumes are Origins and Punk I think the next 2 cover post the original punk era
― Stevolende, Tuesday, 23 February 2021 12:39 (three years ago) link
Brad, keep us posted on your progress with the Cooper. (I am very biased, as evidenced by my shelf of Dennis Cooper books).
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Tuesday, 23 February 2021 17:59 (three years ago) link
oh, and Aimless, for a small sample of Culley:
http://users.speakeasy.net/~subtext/poetry/culley/poem1.htm
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Tuesday, 23 February 2021 18:04 (three years ago) link
I look forward, now, to Paul McCartney's book of lyrics - not because I need the lyrics written down (again), but for the prose commentaries edited by Paul Muldoon.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 19:01 (three years ago) link
ā it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Tuesday, February 23, 2021 10:59 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink
fuckin rocks so far
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, 24 February 2021 19:24 (three years ago) link
I finished THE EARLIEST ENGLISH POEMS. Here are some further notes.
'Beowulf': I'm afraid I don't really know this text. I will try to read it in full when I can. The translation features quite a nice speech from a Watchman or Coastguard asking Beowulf and his sailors why they are arriving on his shore.
'The Wanderer' and 'The Seafarer' are a pair of quite comparable poems about ... wandering seafarers; men who have been exiled from the courts of their Viking or Saxon lords and are now roaming the sea, cold, wet, alone. 'The Wanderer' is also framed by a couple of stanzas written from a Christian perspective, as though presenting the intervening poem as a cautionary example.
Here's an example of the syntax of 'The Wanderer':
Awakeneth after this friendless man,seeth before him fallow waves,seabirds bathing, broading out feathers,snow and hail swirl, hoar-frost falling.Then all the heavier his heart's wounds,sore for his loved lord. Sorrow freshens.
I suppose that compared to modern English syntax it is very compressed and minimal. The last sentence is grammatical in our terms but as minimal as it could be. Sometimes, as in the previous sentence, no verb appears. It is sometimes as though the focus is on presenting the most pungent possible combination of few elemental terms, as unmediated, unsurrounded by excess words, as it can be. (You could argue that 'Awakeneth' is an unhelpful archaism.)
'Hoar-frost' is a repeated term through both poems. The element of the sea is sometimes vividly figured in such kennings (combinations of two words) as 'salt plains', 'salt-crests', 'foam-furrow'. A far land is 'flood-beyond'. Worrying about a coming voyage, a man is 'sea-struck'.
Here 'The Seafarer' talks of how nature has replaced social life:
The swans blareMy seldom amusement; for men's laughterthere was curlew-call, there were the cries of gannets,for mead-drinking the music of the gull.
'The Wife's Complaint' is a woman's lament for being imprisoned far from her husband. I think he has ordered her imprisonment. She curses him (I think it's him), and laments:
Here the grief bred by lordlack preys on me. Some lovers in this worldlive dear to each other, lie warm togetherat day's beginning; I go by myselfabout these earth caves under the oak tree.
There is also a very short fragment called 'Wulf & Eadwacer' (is this all that remains of this text?), voiced by a woman about her lover, amid a love triangle of some kind. It repeats the phrase 'Our fate is forked' and worries of the beloved Wulf that 'if he comes to the camp they will kill him outright'.
A set of Gnomic Verses tell plain truths about the world which include 'Frost shall freeze / fire eat wood' but also, I'm afraid, statements like 'Courage must wax / war-mood in the man, / the woman grow up / beloved among her people'. In other words you could say it naturalises gender roles; but at 1200 years distance I wouldn't want to get into criticising that.
A quite generous set of Riddles are interestingly presented: editor Michael Alexander talks of how the riddle renders non-human objects and animals unrecognisable, and thus creates 'a dislocation of perspective similar to that achieved in the modern theatre by the device known as alienation: a good riddle puzzles and can even be mildly frightening, simply because we do not know what it is that is speaking'. Well said. He also talks of the riddle as akin to the 'invocation' or charm, and the riddler developing 'empathy' which the editor says was first defined by Vernon Lee.
The actual riddles are not very easy to answer correctly. A couple of them are heavy on innuendo, especially one that apparently compares a penis to an onion. Apart from that aspect, the riddles make still clearer Tolkien's use of this era of language and culture.
'The Dream of the Rood' is a poem about the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. Much of the poem is spoken by the cross itself. So there is a kind of riddle aspect here too, the poem voicing an inanimate object. Interestingly the cross says that it could have deliberately fallen down and killed everyone before the crucifixion took place: 'Fast I stood, / who falling could have felled them all'.
The book ends with a long extract from 'The Battle of Maldon' - which indeed takes place in Essex. It describes quite vividly and immediately how the Anglo-Saxon local soldiers fight against Viking invaders, but are defeated. The English (?) leader Brythnoth quite heroically stands against the invaders and is killed. Some soldiers flee but the main voices are those talking of why they will stay and fight, dying for honour:
Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will,the heart fiercer, as our force faileth.
I think I see why the bravery is admirable, but the honour code also seems rather destructive, leading men to premature warlike death where they might make better calculations, including other forms of resistance.
I also read all the notes, glossaries, Introduction and so on. I hope I've learned something, starting from a very low base.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 19:38 (three years ago) link
I haven't quite finished The Song of the Lark. I've about 40 pp yet to go.
It's more uneven than the other Cather I've read, which is not to say it's bad; it has many outstanding passages and many characteristic Cather insights. However, it takes a startling turn into melodrama for about 75 pages in the middle, with high-flown romantic dialogue and plot devices that would be right at home in stage play of the era. Then it returns to a much closer approximation of Cather's normal keen observation of humans being human. Her prose is, as usual, unimpeachable.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Wednesday, 24 February 2021 19:43 (three years ago) link
I agree. It's my least favorite of the major novels -- uncharacteristically turgid.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 24 February 2021 19:51 (three years ago) link
To mention 'The Seafarer' invokes Ezra Pound's translation from c.1912, which the translator Michael Alexander esteems. So I look again at that. Here it all is:
May I for my own self song's truth reckon,Journey's jargon, how I in harsh daysHardship endured oft.Bitter breast-cares have I abided,Known on my keel many a care's hold,And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spentNarrow nightwatch nigh the ship's headWhile she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,My feet were by frost benumbed.Chill its chains are; chafing sighsHew my heart round and hunger begotMere-weary mood. Lest man know notThat he on dry land loveliest liveth,List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,Weathered the winter, wretched outcastDeprived of my kinsmen;Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,There I heard naught save the harsh seaAnd ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,Did for my games the gannet's clamour,Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,The mews' singing all my mead-drink.Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the sternIn icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamedWith spray on his pinion.Not any protectorMay make merry man faring needy.This he little believes, who aye in winsome lifeAbides 'mid burghers some heavy business,Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oftMust bide above brine.Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth thenCorn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh nowThe heart's thought that I on high streamsThe salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.Moaneth alway my mind's lustThat I fare forth, that I afar henceSeek out a foreign fastness.For this there's no mood-lofty man over earth's midst,Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithfulBut shall have his sorrow for sea-fareWhatever his lord will.He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-havingNor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delightNor any whit else save the wave's slash,Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,All this admonisheth man eager of mood,The heart turns to travel so that he then thinksOn flood-ways to be far departing.Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not āHe the prosperous man ā what some performWhere wandering them widest draweth.So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,My mood 'mid the mere-flood,Over the whale's acre, would wander wide.On earth's shelter cometh oft to me,Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhowMy lord deems to me this dead lifeOn loan and on land, I believe notThat any earth-weal eternal standethSave there be somewhat calamitousThat, ere a man's tide go, turn it to twain.Disease or oldness or sword-hateBeats out the breath from doom-gripped body.And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after āLaud of the living, boasteth some last word,That he will work ere he pass onward,Frame on the fair earth 'gainst foes his malice,Daring ado, ...So that all men shall honour him afterAnd his laud beyond them remain 'mid the English,Aye, for ever, a lasting life's-blast,Delight mid the doughty.Days little durable,And all arrogance of earthen riches,There come now no kings nor CƦsarsNor gold-giving lords like those gone.Howe'er in mirth most magnified,Whoe'er lived in life most lordliest,Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.Earthly glory ageth and seareth.No man at all going the earth's gait,But age fares against him, his face paleth,Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,And though he strew the grave with gold,His born brothers, their buried bodiesBe an unlikely treasure hoard.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 20:44 (three years ago) link
Pinefox, thanks so much! Think it might be among my late Professor Mom's books---I know where her copy of Heaney's Beowulf is, keep meaning to check that too---
― dow, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 20:54 (three years ago) link
I read this with interest, thinking of the other modern version. I note:
* Pound's looks like a free translation - he doesn't seem to have scrupled so much about replicating each line.
* He has retained, or used, some kennings: hail-scur, mead-drink, mood-lofty, sea-fare, mere-flood, whale-path, earth-weal, life's-blast.
* He has sometimes used archaisms that may not stand up so well now: for instance: 'Nathless there knocketh now'.
* I think he has made it somewhat more coherent - bringing together the DISLIKE of seafaring and the LOVE of seafaring in the poem and making them, not a puzzling contradiction but more an acceptable paradox; as in 'Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water'. 'Yet' is an important turn here.
* He has sometimes expressed a lot in short terms, for instance using the term 'Burgher' (doesn't this suggest something later, more like Renaissance Germany?): 'Burgher knows not' what seafaring is like.
* On the whole I think he did a fine job, c.1912, of rendering something very old (c.800) modern English; keeping it accessible, emotional; bringing in a tone that was, I think, unusual in the English poetry of the time. (But one would, as usual, need to look carefully and sceptically at that. Every student of English would have focused a good deal on Old English then, after all.)
One could, I'm sure, go a lot further and into detail with comparisons of the original and of multiple translations of this poem.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 20:55 (three years ago) link
Thanks Dow, I'm very glad to hear that I've reminded you of this fascinating little book. I mean to read the Heaney BEOWFULF too.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 20:56 (three years ago) link
this friendless man,seeth before him fallow waves,
Some lovers in this worldlive dear to each other, lie warm togetherat day's beginning; I go by myselfabout these earth caves under the oak tree.
― dow, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 20:57 (three years ago) link
It's funny, Paul McCartney's lyrics with commentary by Muldoon seems like a book I'd much rather never see the light of day lol. (I hate McCartney and Muldoon almost equally).
Glad the Cooper is going well, Brad. The deeper into the cycle you get, the weirder and more interesting it becomes, imho.
I began poet Laura Elrick What This Breathing last nightā have always enjoyed her books, this is no different!
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Wednesday, 24 February 2021 20:59 (three years ago) link
xpost prob shouldn't have taken those lines of context, but they struck me right way---can imagine Sandy Denny singing the ones about some lovers etc.
― dow, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 21:03 (three years ago) link
True! I have just been listening to her LP RENDEZVOUS.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 22:19 (three years ago) link
Thanks for the reminder, haven't listened to that one.
― dow, Wednesday, 24 February 2021 22:57 (three years ago) link
I finished Donald Davie's ARTICULATE ENERGY: AN INQUIRY INTO THE SYNTAX OF ENGLISH POETRY (1955). This is an informal sequel to PURITY OF DICTION IN ENGLISH VERSE (1952), whose first half I read previously. All this was quite an effort, took a little while: about 270 pages of sustained critical prose.
What is Davie saying in ARTICULATE ENERGY? Its topic is, indeed, the syntax of English poetry. It is genuinely an 'inquiry': somewhat open-minded, trying out different critical perspectives, testing his arguments. Engagingly, he says things like 'This statement from Ernest Fenollosa helps my argument', or 'But this argument about Wordsworth, though it supports my case, is in the end tangential'.
You could say that he 'shows the workings': makes his argument open to a reader to intervene and say, in effect: I disagree from this point and therefore I don't follow it from here; I'd reconstruct the argument this way. I think that this is quite a good way for a critic, or any non-fictional writer, to proceed.
He writes in quite a plain style, using colloquial phrases: 'Here Hulme gives away the whole show'. He is forthright: 'Every reader must decide for himself whether he can make this act of faith. I confess for my part I cannot, and it seems to me that after scrapping the contracts traditionally observed between poet and reader, a poet like Pound substitutes a contract unjustly weighted against a reader'. He seeks clarity and simplicity: 'What matters, surely, is that this construction is ugly, inelegant. Ideas of beauty differ, no doubt; but mine are not therefore any less real, for me and perhaps for others'.
He proposes that syntax is important in (English) poetry, and that criticism of it should bear it more in mind. He notes that syntax has various kinds, and he works through arguments that poetry is 'like music', so that the syntax is 'pseudo-syntax', not really saying what it appears to say. He respects a range of kinds of poetry and syntax, including for instance that of Eliot, which ('Ash Wednesday', 'Little Gidding' are good examples) he sees as thoroughly post-Symbolist and 'musical'. But he has a preference for declarative syntax; poems that say something, and try to do it clearly (but not necessarily simplistically) in grammatically correct forms. Something like Pope would probably be the most obvious model. This isn't the most fashionable model for poetry now (or since about 1917), as Davie admits. To some extent he is trying to re-balance, to reinstate the claims of this 'rational' poetry of statement, as against (or alongside) a poetry that, for instance, shuns or breaks form to (perhaps) mime mental impressions.
This rather stereotypes Davie's case. What makes his book harder to parse is that there isn't really a hard distinction between Pope / classical poetry (proper syntax) and Pound's later Cantos (lack of syntax) - those are merely the extremes. But what about the vast middle ground of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Tennyson - surely they're all just as syntactically proper as Pope? So I think the distinction is something else: not so much about having syntax but about the role it plays in generating meaning and feeling.
In a fascinating late chapter, 'What is Modern Poetry?', Davie sums up part of his case:
If the foregoing pages have tended to any one conclusion it is this: the break with the past is at bottom a change of attitude towards poetic syntax. It is from that point of view, in respect of syntax, that modern poetry, so diverse in all other ways, is seen as one. And we can define it thus: What is common to all modern poetry is the assertion or the assumption (most often the latter) that syntax in poetry is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and grammarians. When the poet retains syntactical forms acceptable to the grammarian, this is merely a convention which he chooses to observe. We may acknowledge that such emptied forms are to be found (and frequently too) in Shakespeare and in Milton. But never before the modern period has it been taken for granted that all poetic syntax is necessarily of this sort.
I think Davie wants to say that this modern orthodoxy should be questioned, and that syntax in poetry need not be distinct from syntax in other uses of language: prose, everyday speech. Elsewhere he proposes that those lines of poetry that have gone into 'folk wisdom' should not be disregarded; this could be an index of the continuity of poetry and ordinary language. He argues against those who think it is an error to think that 'the poet means just what he says, that the poetic statement he makes is not wholly different from the statements they make themselves, and that the syntax of his statement is not wholly different in function from the syntax they are used to elsewhere'.
For Davie, therefore, it *is* at least possible that the poet means just what he says; that the poetic statement is somewhat similar to ordinary statements; and that poetry can share syntax with other kinds of language.
Along the way, in this quite open-minded (but admittedly opinionated) and wide-ranging inquiry, Davie compares English and French syntax (but here he seems mainly just to rely on stereotypes of what French is like; he hardly quotes any French); writes on Berkeley and Yeats (he approves of Yeatsian syntax); and provides what seems to me an excellent, lucid summary of the thought of Ernest Fenollosa. You might think, maybe I thought, that Fenollosa was a 'modernist', but Davie likes him a lot, sees him more like an 18th-century thinker. His account of Chinese characters, according to Davie, posits a syntax between and across such characters, and proposes that these characters have a vividness and immediacy that is lost by English abstractions. Davie takes from him an emphasis on strong, distinctive, active verbs.
I liked reading ARTICULATE ENERGY; I'm not sure that I did fully construe its argument; but I'd like to think that I learned something from it. I'm afraid that many critics now wouldn't even bother engaging with its arguments on their own terms - which they mostly deserve, even if one wants to contest them. I think that many critics could learn more from reading older criticism like this than from reading more recent work, which often has less to do with literature and draws on a much shallower knowledge of the history of literature; especially the history of poetry, which I suspect is less well known now than it was when Davie wrote this in 1955.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 25 February 2021 15:28 (three years ago) link
he works through arguments that poetry is 'like music', so that the syntax is 'pseudo-syntax', not really saying what it appears to say.
Music is aural and tonal, while poetry is aural and linguistic. They both contain a sub-articulate component that appeals to the inarticulate parts of the mind, but that component is overwhelmingly present in music, while it is often so disregarded by poets that it is many cases an unused or even rejected tool. In those cases poetry may still be 'like music', but only if nearly-accidental assemblages of sounds can be considered as music.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Thursday, 25 February 2021 19:29 (three years ago) link
I started rereading E. Nesbit's THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET (1904) after decades. But I must admit that after 20 pages of it, I don't feel enthused for the remaining 230. Maybe I'm not an adult who really wants to read children's books, despite my fondness for the idea of them.
I reflect that maybe this is what reading Harry Potter books is like. That's something I still hope to avoid.
― the pinefox, Friday, 26 February 2021 13:30 (three years ago) link
I've begun reading A Journey Round My Skull, by Frigyes Karinthy. It describes his experiences with a brain tumor.
The author was a Hungarian intellectual between the world wars. In typical middle european style this meant he was a "author, playwright, poet, journalist, and translator" according to wikipedia. In the early part of the book this shows up as a helter-skelter playfulness and fecundity of half-absurd and half-serious ideas. As the existence of the tumor becomes increasingly felt and finally discovered, the tone becomes more direct and pragmatic by degrees.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Friday, 26 February 2021 17:42 (three years ago) link
i ran across this story while farting around twitter. i have a hard time sticking with anything these days but i read it all the way through. all i can say is that i enjoyed it and it was a welcome distraction on a friday. it's about queer outlaws and black magic, and it has a happy ending.
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/femme-and-sundance/
― map ca. 1890 (map), Friday, 26 February 2021 20:52 (three years ago) link
If you want to read only one Nesbit, I recommend The Enchanted Castle. Phoenix and the Carpet is just okay Nesbit imo. Bear in mind that it is still very episodic and that the atmosphere builds gradually over the course of the book; it starts out very casual and goofy and then gets more and more uncanny until it's just barely skirting the edges of pure horror.
― Lily Dale, Friday, 26 February 2021 22:17 (three years ago) link
By "it" I mean The Enchanted Castle, not Phoenix.
― Lily Dale, Friday, 26 February 2021 22:34 (three years ago) link
Just finished 'Bleak House'! The way the narration switches between the 2 narrators took a little getting used to, and I got a little lost in the middle at points but overall an amazing read.
― cajunsunday, Friday, 26 February 2021 23:49 (three years ago) link
I've started reading Herman Melville's 'Bartleby'. I reflect that it's a comedy about work written from the point of view of the employer. The colleagues who can only work effectively in the morning and afternoon respectively - that's before Bartleby even enters. The tone, thus far, is lighter than I might have expected.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 27 February 2021 10:20 (three years ago) link
You never read it until now?
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 27 February 2021 11:27 (three years ago) link
I'm afraid not.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 27 February 2021 11:37 (three years ago) link
I finished 'Bartleby'. Not fantastically interesting or appealing, but I can see why the figure has become - an archetype? a reference point? The idea of refusal, of being able to refuse a request or instruction, and simply withdraw to one's one domain: I can see how this interests people. It's also about work, but I can't feel that sympathetic to this figure who's taken on to do a job then refuses to do it, or to leave. (The preposterous introduction to the edition I read compares Bartleby to Jesus Christ, which has no basis in the text.) I think what most strikes me is how it feels more modern than 1853 (though Madame Bovary was about 1857) - a harbinger of Kafka and Beckett as much as a contemporary of Thackeray.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 27 February 2021 17:21 (three years ago) link
i identify inordinately with bartleby
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Saturday, 27 February 2021 17:27 (three years ago) link
Great story.
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Saturday, 27 February 2021 19:22 (three years ago) link
Feels very modern almost like heās taken internet psych advice to go āgray rockā, āIām sorry that wonāt be possibleā, āno is a complete sentenceā, etc.
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Saturday, 27 February 2021 19:24 (three years ago) link
My sis got me Melville's collective poems for Xmas. Rough going. Best to open it at random, read a few stanzas from his 6000-page epic on a white dude on a Middle Eastern pilgrimage, put it down.
On Thursday I finished Scott Eyman's just marvelous Cary Grant bio. It offers contrarian tacks, fights conventional wisdom, and does the reporting too.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 27 February 2021 19:30 (three years ago) link
Melville's poetry has its fans, but I'm not one of them. They are composed in poetic form, but the form adds nothing vital.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Saturday, 27 February 2021 20:29 (three years ago) link
Finished the Elrick, read S*an D. Henry-Smith's 'Wild Peach,' and began DS Marriott's 'Hoodoo Voodoo's this afternoon before taking an unexpectedly long hike in the woods.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Sunday, 28 February 2021 00:13 (three years ago) link
I finished Code of the Woosters which served as my introduction to Wodehouse. I feel like the Wodehousian(?) tone has become such a paradigm of comic writing that it's almost like I had read him before. Certainly I've read many knockoffs. It is a stylish, funny and diverting work. I have no idea how true it is to the upper-class British milieu it depicts. It is almost certainly more utopian in its utter inconsequentialness than any real society that has existed on this earthly plane. Now I'm reading Going to the City by Robert Christgau.
― o. nate, Sunday, 28 February 2021 02:24 (three years ago) link
Kehinde Andrews The New Age of EmpireBeen hearing talks by him recently that seem very articulate so plunked for the book. Though glad I got it intact, odd situation with postal delivery meaning it either got delivered on an odd day or stuck out of the letterbox overnight.
Seems really good so far.But only read intro and part of first chapter.
Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless RacketVol 1 Origins.So far got through him describing how the 4 volumes will break down. & the situation that punk came out of and some influences. Though he's also shown why he doesn't think the Stooges are as all pervasive as suggested. I've disagreed with him on some points so far. Will persevere though but have been reminded of the Ugly Things acolyte who dismissed Fugazi's right to be considered punk since they'd always been math rock which still perturbs me since I like to think of that as a worthwhile mag. Might have thought it par for the course for Shindig.But still, interesting book so far.
― Stevolende, Sunday, 28 February 2021 09:24 (three years ago) link
Cannot imagine being someone who didn't like Bartleby, so strange
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Sunday, 28 February 2021 09:24 (three years ago) link
I also came to Bartleby late in the day, and though I liked it, I guess I was also a little underwhelmed, no doubt because I'd read a billion references to it before coming to the actual thing.
― Zelda Zonk, Sunday, 28 February 2021 10:13 (three years ago) link
Yes, I very much share Zelda Zonk's feeling.
What's great about 'Bartleby'?
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 February 2021 11:26 (three years ago) link
Have finished:
Rohan, The Architecture of Paul RudolphBeam, Broken GlassToker, Fallingwater Rising
― alimosina, Sunday, 28 February 2021 20:38 (three years ago) link
Gist of the distillation (like urine stones collected in passway): Feels very modern almost like heās taken internet psych advice to go āgray rockā, āIām sorry that wonāt be possibleā, āno is a complete sentenceā, etc. (Frequently catching up: identify inordinately with bartleby
― dow, Monday, 1 March 2021 02:20 (three years ago) link
Last night I got about halfway through Five T'ang Poets, as selected and translated by David Young. The five are: Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, and Li Shang-Yin. So far I wouldn't call these translations exciting, but they are usually suggestive/evocative enough to succeed as poems in English.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Friday, 5 March 2021 18:40 (three years ago) link
just finished frisk. these dennis cooper novels are fucked up
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 5 March 2021 19:11 (three years ago) link
thatās for sure. read that one a few years ago and honestly kind of regretted reading it.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, 5 March 2021 21:47 (three years ago) link
i loved it but i can see that. i certainly can't unread it
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 5 March 2021 21:49 (three years ago) link
anyway moving right into the third novel in the george miles cycle, try
the cycle revealed more of itself to me during frisk as well, like up close it is like an anti-love story, a document of extremely unpleasant and empty people having sex that is attached their ultimate fantasies of dismembering someone during sex.... but telescope out a bit and it is about how having sex with infinite variations of the same person (george miles) is a reflection of how much the... narrator/omniscient voice/some of the individual characters/fictional dennis cooper and/or irl dennis cooper are in love with him
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 5 March 2021 22:02 (three years ago) link
that is probably incomprehensible lol
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 5 March 2021 22:03 (three years ago) link
i guess what i mean is it may seem to be all blood, guts, and gaping assholes, but in the margin beyond that it is almost entirely about... transcendent love. i think
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 5 March 2021 22:09 (three years ago) link
^^^ You've got it
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, 5 March 2021 23:47 (three years ago) link
Frisk is my fave of the cycle, btw
I finished DS Marriott's Hoodoo Voodoo, then read the Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse reprint of NH Pritchard's The Matrix, now I'm onto Tom Mandel and Daniel Davidson's collaborative long poem, Absence Sensorium. It's really something, I think sometimes about how Davidson died much too young, age of 40, and how we would be better off if he were still alive and still writing this weird and provocative work.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, 5 March 2021 23:50 (three years ago) link
Hi, I'm fairly new to the world of literary-fiction (and also, literary non-fiction) and totally new to this thread (and also, talking about books in general).
I just finished Swimming Home by Deborah Levy - it's kind of straightforward and elusive in equal measure, in a way I'm not sure I "got." It's hard to say what it was, but something about it was just less than satisfying. I welcome suggestions on her other books.I am now reading Cleanness by Garth Greenwell. I'm 2 of 7 chapters in and there's also been blood and assholes (not gaping as much as clenched tho') and, arguably, traces of transcendent love (maybe not love but desire?).
― ed.b, Sunday, 7 March 2021 00:14 (three years ago) link
Hi. I don't have any suggestions since I haven't read those books you mention, but welcome!
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Sunday, 7 March 2021 00:43 (three years ago) link
I thought Cleanness was great!
― horseshoe, Sunday, 7 March 2021 00:45 (three years ago) link
I mostly lurk but popping my head up to say if you enjoy Deborah Levy's style but found Swimming Home somehow unsatisfying (I felt similarly) then her "living memoirs", Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, are well worth your time. They're elegant and weird and brutal, and they don't miss their mark.They're also more moving.I sometimes find her fiction more exciting and interesting to hear her describe than to read. Her voice is so strong it almost doesn't suit being stuffed into a story, like someone wearing clothes much too small for them.
― verhexen, Sunday, 7 March 2021 01:04 (three years ago) link
I mostly lurk but popping my head up to say...
Bravo! Encore!
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Sunday, 7 March 2021 03:37 (three years ago) link
Confessions of a Fox - Jordy Rosenberg. The one littered with critical praise often with the words 'romp' and 'rollicking' in, hence it being about a year since I bought it to reading it. I'm *just about* persisting despite it being yet another example of a version of 18th century style - you know the Sort, all Capital Letters and Rhetorick with a k and an entire slang dictionary slathered onto the pages to produce Effcts both Comical and Tragicke. I only know of one decent version of this mode, and that's Pynchon's Mason and Dixon.
There's also an unreliable academic narrator who communicates mainly through footnotes, in a facetious and grating tone.
it's very much a first novel.
there are aspects which deserve longer scrutiny, trans erotica and an attempt to dramatize gender fluidity in the language of the time, but it comes across as current thought cloaked in an ersatz version of the language of the time*. After all 18th century english was how serious people communicated seriously in the 18th century. it's not a joke or cartoon.
I'm thinking of giving up persisting soon, but will keep going for the moment.
* I should add that by this i very much do not mean 'oh god woke 18th century,' - gender fluidity and frameworks of gender representation in that period are a real discipline, and the other is a real academic of them. but there's a lack of the sense of the cadence of thinking and representation of thought from the 18th century doing the work, it's more like current frameworks with 18th century argot.
― Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 16:05 (three years ago) link
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. Collection of short stories. Good, I think. Interior monologues in domestic spaces, with a careful awareness of the mechanics of interiority, the circling round a thing, the unusual snags of feeling and recognition by which thought progresses or insight is gained. The elliptical and non-cliched nature of thinking and feeling. Someone said that she was similar to Jen Calleja, but i don't get that at all tbh, in fact Pond reminds me more in some ways of Gerald Murnane, an understanding of how to get to the profound from the repeated mundane and quotidian, and how the unusual or genuinely strange is actually part of that fabric.
The effect to me is a little like trying to catch an elusive thought that seems to have whisked away just before the moment you were aware of it, but which you feel has insight. Sometimes you find it and can look at it, most of the time it flits away without any sense of what meaning or importance it may have had. CLB is adept at catching them.
― Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 16:10 (three years ago) link
Hello, I have never posted to this board before, but I have just started reading Sensoria Thinkers for the Twenty-first Century by McKenzie Wark as I finally finished reading the Jacques Derrida biography that came out last year.
― Oor Neechy, Monday, 8 March 2021 16:41 (three years ago) link
confusing ambiguity in my post:
for 'and the other is a real academic of them' read 'and the author is a real academic of them'
Hi Oor Neechy. How are the 21st Century thinkers?
― Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 17:14 (three years ago) link
Started Chess Story, Stefan Zweig, last night. It's novella length and I should have finished it last night, too, but couldn't keep my eyes open. No reflection on the story, which was taut and beautifully constructed (as far as I got).
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Monday, 8 March 2021 17:53 (three years ago) link
Hey Neechy.
Chess Story is fabulous. One of those books I know I own but which has been nabbed by the book poltergeist.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 8 March 2021 18:59 (three years ago) link
I'm reading Love's Work by Gillian Rose. Like Aimless, I should probably have finished it last night but was blinking back tears and couldn't manage it. It's propelled by onrushing death and Rose releases a torrent of wordplay and memory; it's full of wry observation and shatteringly unadorned descriptions of what happened to her people and the important relationships she's maintained and lost. What a beautiful book.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 8 March 2021 19:04 (three years ago) link
loveās work is amazing.
― Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 19:17 (three years ago) link
I think I picked it up from a recommendation on here - may well have been you Fizzles so thank you. I vaguely knew of her through Jacqueline Rose and Adam Phillips but hadn't read anything by her. Jesus, for such a short book it's got extraordinary heft.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Monday, 8 March 2021 19:21 (three years ago) link
^ I've heard enough. I just ordered a used copy for myself.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Monday, 8 March 2021 19:29 (three years ago) link
think i got the rec from xyzzzz and others itt. but yes - more the better! incredibly moving. i need to go back and revisit some passages.
― Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 19:35 (three years ago) link
Hi Oor Neechy. How are the 21st Century thinkers?ā Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 17:14 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
ā Fizzles, Monday, 8 March 2021 17:14 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
Just started it, but I think its trying to stay away from old white guys from the west
― Oor Neechy, Monday, 8 March 2021 19:37 (three years ago) link
I've heard mixed reviews of the Rosenberg book, even tho a friend of mine loved it, he also has sometimes...well, our tastes align to a certain degree, but there are things he enjoys that I find awful. Like Zizek.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Monday, 8 March 2021 20:17 (three years ago) link
Chess Story is fantastic, agreed.
Just finished The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins. It never rubs the reader's face in the horror, doesn't go in for graphic details of torture/murder, but manages to be emotionally overwhelming just by the loss experienced by the people he talks to and writes about, both of their friends/families/lovers and of their hopes for something better. Devastating book, highly recommended.
Nearly finished with Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada. Much less stressful to read once it moves out of Berlin, still not quite sure what I think of it.
Started Log of the USS Mrs. Unguentine while outside on a really nice day, kind of waiting for another day like that to finish it.
― JoeStork, Monday, 8 March 2021 20:44 (three years ago) link
Glad you found The Jakarta Method to be as bracing and informative as I did! One of the best books I read last year.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Monday, 8 March 2021 21:30 (three years ago) link
I read it in October at tables' rec. OTM.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 March 2021 21:37 (three years ago) link
is James McBride good? Seems like somebody on ilb said book x was v good, book y was shit (or vice-versa).
― dow, Monday, 8 March 2021 23:24 (three years ago) link
Another vote her for Deborah Levy's non-fiction. There's a third volume coming out this year.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Tuesday, 9 March 2021 00:25 (three years ago) link
https://lithub.com/50-very-bad-book-covers-for-literary-classics/
― G.A.G.S. (Gophers Against Getting Stuffed) (forksclovetofu), Wednesday, 10 March 2021 23:45 (three years ago) link
š¬
― Fizzles, Thursday, 11 March 2021 07:36 (three years ago) link
Speaking of Jane Austen... I'm almost done reading Mansfield Park for the first time and jeez what a slog. All of Austen's fine observation and irrepressible irony in service of a complete nothing of a story, dragged out to interminable length and populated almost entirely by creeps, schemers, dunderheads, sluggards, harridans, and drips.
― Non meat-eaters rejoice ā our culture has completely lost its way (ledge), Thursday, 11 March 2021 08:57 (three years ago) link
I believe James Morrison did some posts on crazy print-on-demand covers for classics ages ago?
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 11 March 2021 11:20 (three years ago) link
Yes, a classic!
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 11 March 2021 13:41 (three years ago) link
Finished Mansfield Park, I can see how it might be an interesting book to discuss - Lady Bertram as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that once a woman has secured her living through marriage she need no longer even think, let alone act or speak; the whole thing a subversion of a romance, where all the action happens off-stage in the last twenty pages. And I actually liked Fanny, yes she is quiet and timid and compliant, but she is clear sighted and keeps her head and stands her ground when she ultimately needs to. Still think it was a snoozefest though.
― Non meat-eaters rejoice ā our culture has completely lost its way (ledge), Friday, 12 March 2021 09:46 (three years ago) link
Stranded by Clinton Walkerreally great so far, gone through the early years of Saints & Birdman and just been introduced to the Boys Next door and their mate Chris Walsh.& the author's opwn background. Very readable, do wish I had picked this up when it first came out and wonder if tehre is a reason I didn't. Other tahn not seeing it. BUt would have thunk that Tower in Dublin would have got it and failing taht Rough Trade in London. So wonder if there was a reason I wouldn't have been aware of it. Obviously no internet at the time at least for me.Oh well, reading it now.
― Stevolende, Friday, 12 March 2021 10:25 (three years ago) link
Jean Stafford didn't write short stories so much as reports or dispatches about people she's observed. Occasionally it works.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 12 March 2021 10:28 (three years ago) link
I'm re-reading some Chekhov and I can't stop thinking about Easter Night.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Friday, 12 March 2021 22:39 (three years ago) link
I am caught between two stool, having started both My Dog Tulip, Ackerly, and Psmith in the City, Wodehouse. It's now a race for my affections.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Saturday, 13 March 2021 04:35 (three years ago) link
hott
― mookieproof, Saturday, 13 March 2021 06:18 (three years ago) link
I've started Siri Hustvedt, MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE. It's very readable. NYC and poetry in the late 1970s - goes down surprisingly easily. Look forward to more.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 14 March 2021 17:37 (three years ago) link
ON the last section of David Olusoga The World's War and armistice has been signed. just been reading about black troops fathering babies in the Rhineland and the later Nazi response which is disgusting.& Black troops who had got some respect from fightig as part of teh French Army triggering the US army to try to get them treated with acomplete lack of respect. Which seemed to be more prevalent after the fighting ended.
Good book, think I'll read more by him.
Finished Kehinde Andrews New Age of Empire which was a pretty scathing overview of the West's exploitation of the colonies and how it doesn't seem to be getting much better just teh exploiters seems to have changed. China and the rich of various countries exploiting resources and allowing teh money to go to the white west. NOt sure what any form of egalitarianism can build on if the resources are all going to be gone.
Stranded Clinton WalkerJUst getting to the Birthday party imploding and me getting the timing of Jeffrey Wegener's playing with tehm wrong. It wasa Dutch tour after which Mick Harvey took over the drums again and then teh antipodean dates at the end are Des Hefner.OH and just when i was wondering why the Moodists hadn't had much coverage they appeared on about the next page. Chris Walsh having appeared much earlier since he was around to help teach Tracy Pew bass.
― Stevolende, Sunday, 14 March 2021 17:52 (three years ago) link
Last night I finished both Psmith in the City and My Dog Tulip. Remarks follow.
In this book Wodehouse delivers a Psmith who is recognizably in character. This is a sequel to his earlier 'public schoolboy' stories in which Psmith plays the eccentric second fiddle to one Mike Jackson, a handsome lad who is normal as milk and wields a wicked bat in cricket. Both Mike and Psmith appear again here, but now as apprentices in a bank.
Wodehouse wisely pushes Psmith to the fore here, rather than as a secondary character. The major flaw in this yarn is a lack of scope for Psmith to fully blossom out, as he did once he was finally untethered from the stolid Mike and sent to NYC in Psmith, Journalist, a much finer book. This novel is comparatively tepid compared to Wodehouse in full cry.
As for My Dog Tulip, I was rather less impressed with it than the critics who supplied the Introduction and cover blurbs, which tout it as a masterpiece. One blurb from a NYT reviewer claims the book "shakes up our sentimental preconceptions about dogs". This is nonsense. Ackerly is hugely sentimental about Tulip. He keeps trying to deliver her a life of perfect unclouded happiness; he describes her beauty in the rapturous tones of a lover; he is often consternated because his attempts to be the perfect dog owner for his pet keep coming a cropper through his lack of practical judgment. Unsentimental this is not.
I kept wanting to tell him to settle down, try less hard and just find a reasonable balance of his needs and hers, some pleasant life together that he knew how to accomplish, instead of imagining how wonderful it would be if Tulip could be made blissful, then failing at it over and over.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Tuesday, 16 March 2021 23:35 (three years ago) link
As normal as milk?
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 17 March 2021 09:01 (three years ago) link
The Ackerley to read is My Father and Myself. That's his masterpiece.
― Zelda Zonk, Wednesday, 17 March 2021 09:43 (three years ago) link
There's a Captain Beefheart album and song called "Safe as Milk", featuring the lyric, "I may be hungry but I sure ain't weird".
xp
― o. nate, Wednesday, 17 March 2021 15:19 (three years ago) link
Heh, when Pinefox used that phrase,Beefheart's explanation of the title popped into my head: after WWII and subsequent nuclear tests, fallout isotopes were found in mother's milk (cdc.gov still has something about this).
― dow, Wednesday, 17 March 2021 16:53 (three years ago) link
haha (presumably in response to https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/books/review/autofiction-my-dark-vanessa-american-dirt-the-need-kate-elizabeth-russell-jeanine-cummins-helen-phillips.html)
strange to have come of age reading great novels of ambition, substance, & imagination (Dostoyevsky, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner) & now find yourself praised & acclaimed for wan little husks of "auto fiction" with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer...— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) March 16, 2021
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Wednesday, 17 March 2021 19:28 (three years ago) link
So 'autofiction' has finally caught on in English?
― pomenitul, Wednesday, 17 March 2021 19:29 (three years ago) link
unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 17 March 2021 19:31 (three years ago) link
JCO wrote some amazing stories, but God she's just awful.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Wednesday, 17 March 2021 21:30 (three years ago) link
Gore Vidal: the three scariest words in the English language are "Joyce Carol Oates."
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 17 March 2021 21:32 (three years ago) link
I like autofiction bc im not very smart
― Canon in Deez (silby), Wednesday, 17 March 2021 21:34 (three years ago) link
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/8197RW+F2hL.jpg
― The Ballad of Mel Cooley (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 17 March 2021 22:07 (three years ago) link
i knew someone would reference that awful, catty gore vidal comment ugh
― johnny crunch, Wednesday, 17 March 2021 22:09 (three years ago) link
I nabbed a free copy of Lincoln in the Bardo and started it last night. It seems to me rather too self-concious about telling its story unconventionally, so that people will know instantly that this book is Experimental and therefore Important, but it did manage to not grate on me, yet.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Thursday, 18 March 2021 00:11 (three years ago) link
after a couple of months of mostly adventure/spy/thriller/detective/mystery novels am now reading the old grove press jarry selected works... just about to start on the exploits & opinions of dr faustroll, pataphysician which i did read a few years back in a separate edition, but a revisit in this case is no bad thing.
― no lime tangier, Thursday, 18 March 2021 05:47 (three years ago) link
This has doubtless been linked everywhere already, but enjoyed this on wanhuskgate: https://www.the-fence.com/online-only/from-husk-til-dawn
In particular this tickled me
Elsewhere, there are dissenting voices, to be found. Ben Northman, the 56-year-old author of England is Piss and The Skipton Goblin, has no time for trendy movements. āWe donāt have autofiction in Barnsley,ā he told me. āFolk round these parts want granite-hard muscular fiction, about witches building dry stone walls.
― Piedie Gimbel, Thursday, 18 March 2021 12:48 (three years ago) link
finished try, the third novel in dennis cooper's george miles cycle, last night. it's my favorite so far i think? even though it didn't really have the meta dimensions of frisk or uncut misery of closer. it was kind of a straight up love story, albeit embroidered by the most nihilistic depravity like everāand it's a love story between a bi dude (who is earnest and beautiful and pretty thoroughly fucked up by all of the sexual abuse his parents and relatives visit upon him) and a straight dude (who can barely move from the depths of his heroin addiction) no less! hopeless ppl feeling profound tenderness for each other... i wanted to cry every other page
it's also uhhh so funny. i feel very weird reading dennis cooper bc he is capable of making me laugh at the most awful, evil shit, i.e. my favorite line in the book, delivered from the main character to one of his dads:
āIf you loved me . . .āāZiggy slugsāā. . . you wouldnāt rim me while Iām crying.ā
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Thursday, 18 March 2021 15:05 (three years ago) link
it is fun to read the goodreads reviews that totally don't get it, or think that it's celebrating the abuses it documents
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Thursday, 18 March 2021 15:09 (three years ago) link
I gave up on Lincoln in the Bardo last night.
As far as I read, the qualities of his imagined version of the bardo was the most interesting feature of the book and by 100 pages in, that particular feature was fixed and its continuing interest was exhausted. As befits ghosts trapped in the bardo, all the characters are unhappy and tormented by some aspect of their earthly life which they obsess about endlessly. This tends to make each character very sketchy and one-note, which Saunders seems to understand, because he keeps multiplying them.
All this was very keenly imagined and depicted. My difficulty was that such characters became extremely tedious company, no matter how many of them I was introduced to. I just couldn't stick to it. NB: Many ILBers enjoyed this book, so take this opinion as personal to me.
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Thursday, 18 March 2021 16:57 (three years ago) link
I think Piedie Gimbel's link is good.
āI think itās generational jealousy really,ā said Moneyshire when asked about Carol Oatesā comments. āThe typical reader of Oatesās time, the olden days, was probably wealthy, had a lot of time on their hands, maybe had a few slaves and could devote a lot of time to big complicated books. Whereas now, because of the internet, we donāt have to spend hours evoking trauma. We can just write the word ātraumaā on a page of spotless creamy paper, with a grainy black and white image of some twigs or a bruised leg ā and that really does the same job.ā
― the pinefox, Thursday, 18 March 2021 17:09 (three years ago) link
Just read The Fourth Island by Sarah Tolmie, which I saw recommended on Reddit, of all places. A novella about a fourth Aran Island, existing out of time and hidden from almost everyone, on which lost and despairing people occasionally wash up and find themselves fixed in certain ways. Itās written in a kind of fragmented folktale style, skipping backwards and forwards in different charactersā lives. I thought it was quite lovely.
― JoeStork, Thursday, 18 March 2021 18:36 (three years ago) link
That sounds quite good!
― the pinefox, Friday, 19 March 2021 13:39 (three years ago) link
My experience with Lincoln in the Bardo is that is gets more fluid and readable later on - it really starts by throwing the format and eccentricities at you but coheres much more in the second half.
I finished Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, which is a book I appreciated, and then Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This, which a lot of people here are talking about, also a good example of "starts by throwing the format and eccentricities at you but coheres much more in the second half."
Currently reading: Kelly Link - Get Into Trouble.
― ed.b, Friday, 19 March 2021 13:40 (three years ago) link
Cleanness was uneven, as a series of anecdotes might be. The first couple were the best.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 19 March 2021 13:49 (three years ago) link
Brad, Guide and Period are....uh...probably the most insane of the Miles cycle. That line you posted is one of my favorites, too, lol.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, 19 March 2021 17:13 (three years ago) link
Autofiction can be fine, imho... I was taught by two of the main members of the New Narrative school, so I have some bias, yes. But a lot of more mainstream autofiction seems a little lazy and/or suspect, and the oversaturation of the market with that type of stuff is a real thing.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, 19 March 2021 17:21 (three years ago) link
Also, I fucking hate Gore Vidal, even before I read that quote for the first time today. Ghastly misogynist shite.
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, 19 March 2021 17:23 (three years ago) link
you have more of a talent for hating than I do
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Friday, 19 March 2021 17:25 (three years ago) link
Might very well be true.
Regarding your experience with LitB, I will honestly say that I think Saunders is a masterful short story writer, and a pretty middling to mediocre novelist. And that's okay!
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, 19 March 2021 17:33 (three years ago) link
(As in, I also didn't care for LitB, thought it was a novella-length book that he stretched out interminably)
i'm half way through shuggie bain. so far it's been a mixture of this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5VaPQflLq0
and comic scenes that are about as funny as a bbc1 comedy for old people, and extremely light and superficial melodrama. i understand it gets better, so i'm going to stick with it, but staggered it won so many prizes tbh.
― š šš¢šØ (caek), Friday, 19 March 2021 17:46 (three years ago) link
ā it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, March 19, 2021 10:33 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink
fundamentally agree with this even though i enjoyed bardo more than expected (likely bc i went in with low expectations)
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 19 March 2021 19:20 (three years ago) link
it DOES feel like an overextended novella
ā it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, March 19, 2021 10:13 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
two people have suggested that period will be my favorite and i'm so excited to get to it
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, 19 March 2021 19:28 (three years ago) link
Period is the most like The Sluts, if you've read any other Cooper. Very much about the lines between online sociality and fantasy vs/ the "real world"
― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, 19 March 2021 21:01 (three years ago) link
Having one of those weekends, so rather than sleeping away the day I found myself rereading The Mystery of Mercy Close (Marian Keyes). Iāve actually read this before, probably about a year after it came out, but had only meant to dip into it today and instead ended up rereading the whole thing with barely a pause.I think her stuff is very unfairly maligned, mainly by people whoāve never read her and mainly because of the marketing, cos her subjects are dark. Thereās addiction (Rachelās Holiday), bereavement (Anybody Out There?), all the classics. But even the lightest books are tinged heavily with darkness, as the author has experienced these things herself and writes them too. TMOMC is about depression - something the author talked about a lot - but itās also as the title says, a mystery. Not just the titular one in the plot but the things that our narrator Helen, a misanthropic post-crash private detective struggling through the ruins of her life - has going on in the background. Why wonāt her former best friend speak to her anymore, what happened with her and sleazebag Jay, why has she ended up homeless? So I really enjoyed it and all its wonderfully detailed characters on reread, particularly the overachieving sister (been there) and the fussy, overinvolved mammy (been there too), but most of all the long slow tightening as Keyes unravels the plot and as Helen falls apart. Even the tertiary characters in this have life and vigour and the short sharp sentences that sometimes fade into spiralling vague thoughts exactly mirror Helenās personality at different times. Sometimes it is brisk, sometimes it is slow (but not very often, the whole thing takes place over a week with sparingly used flashbacks). Truly a great way to spend a grey Saturday morning/evening.
― Scamp Granada (gyac), Saturday, 20 March 2021 15:52 (two years ago) link
Also, itās March, shouldnāt we have a spring thread?
― Scamp Granada (gyac), Saturday, 20 March 2021 15:53 (two years ago) link
yes. great idea!
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Saturday, 20 March 2021 16:49 (two years ago) link
Done and dusted.
Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books
― Judge Roi Behan (Aimless), Saturday, 20 March 2021 16:59 (two years ago) link