Are You There, God? What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?

I'm continuing in the LoA Melville omnibus. I barely squeezed my way through some of the more elaborately upholstered Uncollected Prose, but mainly the nonfiction; several of the uncollected tales spin their way through light and dark---upholstery in the windspout too, sure---"COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" is the non pareil rallying cry that at any hour may waken the debtor-defying narrator to new possibilities in the seasons of fuck you---also, he finally discovers who owns the miraculous cock and won't sell it to him: they're poor and sick, but they cheer that sound as much as our high roller does.
The narrator of "I And My Chimney" comes to resemble his lofty, massive, disruptive, increasingly old-ass chimney, as Melville sometimes waxex Borgesian, though not enough that Borgesian has to wax Melville for a while. The main thing is the power struggle between this legally secure paterfamilas and his wife and daughters (his wife is too for the new, so spirited that she flies around and around 'til she might as well be in the chimney. The self-satisfaction of the Unreliable Narrator is so vivid that it disrupts the story's architecture, as the chimney does the rest of the house and family: it's all well and fine for us to sympathize with these downtrodden female characters--the downtrodden are ever with us in this omnibus, and usually the author is with and for them, no question, as in the Industrial Revolution post-fairy tale "The Taratarus of Maids," the like increasingly incisive, now anguished-to-angry momentum of "Poor Nan's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs" and "Jimmy Rose," burning their sentimentality---but here---well, it's show not tell.
Which may have made for a hit, because "The Apple Tree Table" is something of a sequel, but the daddy-narrator and his equally flappable spouse---they're determined to be responsible representatives of Reality for their daughters, and the help, but they're getting out of (and back into, back out of) their depth here. It all works out, in a new way for all concerned--"Original Spiritual Manifestations" (that's the subtitle) indeed. Cute trick, and any inspirational value is just part of that, but not nothing, since it brings them closer, awww.

Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark
Stephen King, Later

xpost the like*wise* increasingly incisive.

This edition of "Billy Budd"---"unfinished" at the author's death, so conjectural as published, but now with a few cobwebs swept away, seems even more relentless, even more irreducible than ever---torturous passages are brief, and seem necessary to/part of the historically plausible, dutiful and passionate narrator's voice and life, as he spends them in getting this account down.

"unfinished" in quotes, because--what more could he possibly have said, that would have improved the story...?

A courtesy link to the previous 'spring of 2021' thread:

Spring 2021: Forging ahead to Bloomsday as we read these books

Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed.
Picked this up in a charity shop a while back and it's sat in a bookpile way too long. Thought I'd get to it now I'm reading various antiracism/decolonising things. Did hear somebody say it was good on a podcast or webinar last year.

White Fragility Robin DiAngelo
Thought this quite good . Recognised behaviours she talked about to be things I'd encountered.
Do hope that this and others somewhat like it being major sellers does mean that attitudes change and hope it's permanently. Did see there was at least one backlash book calling this fiction. But would be good if this was a turning point of sorts. Probably extremely optimistic.

Rose Simpson Muse, Odalisque,Handmaiden
Memoir of one time ISBer.
Very readable.

An Indigenous People's History of the United States Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
Scathing overview of 200 years of oppression of various forms against the Native people of the area. Hoping there may be some progress made there too attempts to fulfil the white side of various treaties that only seemed to be one sided or utterly disposable. That is to say restore things to the Native population that were supposed to be protected in them. The introduction of Debbie Harland in her cabinet role is a start as is the cancellation of various deleterious projects that the previous incumbency supported.

I've evidently paused on the novel TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980 because I've started on David Thomson, TRY TO TELL THE STORY (2009), a book received for my birthday.

It's vivid, conversational, sly, intimate - just what you would hope from DT, really.

I finished World of Wonders last night. I'm not sure what I thought of it. On the plus side, it is well-written, intelligent, and entertaining, so I have no problem saying it is an enjoyable book on the whole. Where my appraisal wobbles away from spirited endorsement, it it due to factors that most readers wouldn't give much weight to.

As the third book in a trilogy with continuing characters and plot elements, Davies felt obliged to wrap up some dangling ends having to do with a character who otherwise gets minimal space in this novel, but suddenly becomes the sole focal point in the final 30 pages. This is a bit jarring if, like me, you last read the other two books decades ago and have no recollection of them. I think that jarring effect would apply to anyone who approached this a a standalone novel.

The other unease I felt upon finishing it was more philosophical and is vaguely similar to the unease I felt at the end of Hitchcock's Psycho, where a pompous psychologist suddenly appears in the final minutes to clinically explain Norman Bates's mother fixation and, to put it simply, it is a bunch of bollocks. In this book Davies uses a similar ploy to tidily explain the circumstances around the death of that suddenly-central character from the past novels. We are expected to accept it as the solution to the mystery we didn't know we were supposed to be interested in until a few pages ago, and what's worse, it rings false.

I finished "To The Lighthouse". I guess I would agree with the judgment of Pinefox and Leonard Woolf (when he first read the manuscript) that it's a masterpiece. I would add that it's a well-deserved modernist landmark. I certainly wouldn't want every writer to try to write this way, and I'm not even sure I'd like to read much more of Woolf in this mode, at least not right after finishing this one, but as an example of a radical reconception of what a novel can be that succeeds both on its own terms and as a challenge to more conventional forms of fiction, it's hard to deny. The temptation is just to see it as a triumph of art qua art. Perhaps the reputation makes it hard to discern clearly what are in some ways an odd combination of elements: forward-looking feminism alongside somewhat recalcitrant and unquestioned classism, raw nostalgia and sentiment against steely denial of same, highly introspective and subjective stream-of-consciousness perspective against an almost panpsychic vibe at times.

Indigenous Peoples' History should be required reading for every person in the US, afaic, glad you've found it compelling Steveolende.

I've been on my continued Prynne kick, and also reading a chapter of Anna Tsing's "The Mushroom at the End of the World" every morning with coffee and breakfast. Great book.

Perhaps the reputation makes it hard to discern clearly what are in some ways an odd combination of elements: forward-looking feminism alongside somewhat recalcitrant and unquestioned classism, raw nostalgia and sentiment against steely denial of same, highly introspective and subjective stream-of-consciousness perspective against an almost panpsychic vibe at times. I think that's what makes it such a compelling read! The tension in the coherence of her voice here, as in Melville's best, and even lesser work. Not that his POV is the same (he's very aware of classism, for instance, however he or his characters are feeling about in a given scene), but there's a similar struggle, and his can certainly seem just as high-strung as hers. Have you read Mrs Dalloway?

(yall I put in a request for thread title change this morning, sorry it's such an eyesore)

his *voice* can certainly seem as high-strung as hers

Excellent commentary by o.nate.

Gonna finally start Alan Moore's Jerusalem.

Thanks, pinefox and dow. No, I haven't read Mrs. Dalloway (yet).

Table I need to read the black & LatinX volume in the same series written by Roxanne's husband Paul. I did see him do a talk on it a couple of months back.

Those various People's Histories of the US are part of a Penguin series called Revisioning. There's also a queer and a disabled volume as well as a black women's.
Sound like things it would be good to have read widespread.
Also sounds like a concept that should have volumes on other territories. So wonder if anything else is in the works.
I thought Penguin was a British publishing house anyway, not sure if that matters currently. But might think that they might commission something similar on the UK. Unless they already have something they see as being that.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz helped research the Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States whenever that was so I'm not sure if that is why this series have the title framework they do. Her book is later in the series as they were released or I would just assume that to be likely. Apparently when the Zinn book was finished she noticed a glaring omission in there being a lack of comment on indigenous people. She pointed that out to Zinn who said he wouldn't know where to start but maybe she could write one and she came out with this decades later.
She also appears in Exterminate All the Brutes which I think she also helped research.
I'm picking up whatever histories I can that are more sympathetic to indigenous people in America and not valorised in the unfortunately traditional way. Indian fighting was presented as a noble cause for way too long. I just got Mari Sandoz book Cheyenne Autumn from the library. Supposed to be a lot more pro Indian than I feared. It pops up in the Dunbar-Ortiz at one point which is why I looked into it.

I thought Penguin was a British publishing house

I think when they merged with Random House, they became the biggest US publisher, too.

Back to TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980: it still contains no noticeably good writing but a notable amount of bad writing, characterisation, scene-setting.

The question that starts to arise is why it was published. Commercial potential? A persuasive literary agent?

Enjoying the Alan Moore, which better be the case as it's over a thousand pages and the type is tiny.

This statement will be loaded with all sorts of literary prejudice, but after reading a generic efficient dystopian sci-fi thing it feels so good to dig into something with actual ambition, that tries to do things with language and demands the reader's attention. Lots of stuff about the decline of working class culture and, this being Moore, metaphysical shenanigans. Difficult to keep up with some of the descriptions of Northampton architecture tho, having never been.

Pinefox, ngl: Prentiss has money and connections.

I know Northampton quite well, but I can't say that its architecture, as such, made the greatest impression on me.

Hence a bit surprised to hear that AM would focus on it. But maybe he can make it interesting.

Table: that's very interesting and telling indeed, and squares with the assumptions I am starting to have to make about this novel.

My House of Memories Merle Haggard
memoir of the Outlaw country artist. So far he's not left his teens and he's already been in serious trouble with the law several times.
He's talked about trying to escape from minimal security detention homes and higher security more adult lock ups.
He's also been practising his Lefty Frizell influenced singing and playing.
THis seems to be a bit achronological since he talks about more contemporary times to his writing. I just read him talking about how he structures his band.
Quite enjoyable but I think he's not exactly the most progressive. Not the diametric opposite either it would appear but he aint exactly woke.
Have had this out of the library way too long. So trying to get it finished and back despite this having an extended lending time which they appear to have finally moved away from on the book i took out last week.

Cheyenne Autumn Mari Sandoz
Nebraska woman of Swiss extract describing the attempt by several Cheyenne INdians to return to traditional lands from the paltry reservation they had been dumped on. The book is apparently much more sympathetic to the Indians than the Ford film might suggest.
So far I've read the introduction where Sandoz talks about growing up with various indians passing through the house at different times.
This book is back to a 3 week lend after the book son my account have just been being extended continually automaticallly. Maybe a good sign for lockdowns etc, hope that doesn't change back again without reason.

The New Jim Crow Alexander
The story of how US prisons became an employment factory. So far the author has been looking at the history of the US including post Civil War days with the Reconstruction and then the birth of the first Jim Crow.
I'm noticing the font used in this version seems to be different to what I'm used to so wondering what the array of different fonts used for main text in a popular paperback is. Just finding that I'm not sure hwo much I like the way this looks on the page and it may be my eyes but not great anyway. Cos this is something I'm really dying to read.

LIving A Feminist Life Sara Ahmed
Book by black American lesbian feminist talking about how she got to her perspective on things. Pretty majorly interesting.
I should have got to this sooner rather than having it sitting around on a shelf
-

After casting about for something a bit offbeat, I've been reading Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Lyall Watson. It's an NYRB reprint, which is usually a reliable indicator of an interesting book, but I'm not particularly impressed so far. Still, it's different from Yet Another Novel, so that's why I persist.

After reading the rest of the Melville LoA omnibus, I went back to the (1770e-1820s) historical novel, Israel Potter, based on an obscure memoir, self-published by its ghostwriter, with "improvisations," as this volume's editorial essay puts it, spinning out of Melville's own observations in travel, also the papers of, for instance, John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen,both of whom take very memorable method-in-their-madness turns in American Revolutionary Wartime Europe (Allen as loudmouthed, charismatic prisoner of war). Ben Franklin's in Paree, the same BF who made D.H. Lawrence nauseous when he read Poor Richard's Almanac(you deserve it, DH).

Potter the tenacious underdog is very much the central of attention, and Melvile takes him through every time scale, up to 40 years in one chapter, perfectly timed adventures, intrigues, sojourns, with just the right, concise descriptions,comments, questions (wonders, after a *perhaps* particularly bloody battle, if civilization isn't just a higher form of barbarism). Some poetic moments, poignant ones too, plenty momentum. Can see I'm going to have to read his first, South Sea novels---and is Patrick O'Brian good? Melville's changing my mind about historicals, which I don't think I've ever read before.

(Oh I did read Vidal's Julian and a Hugo set when I was maybe 14, don't remember a word. Do remember being disappointed by original I, Claudius after the TV series. But enjoyed "Lord John and The Plague of Zombies," a spin-off of Diana Gabaldon's Highlander series. LJ is a fixer, discreetly summoned by another member of the Gay Old Boy Network, and seeking the assistance of a community of maroons, escaped slaves, in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.)

is Patrick O'Brian good?

It depends on what you enjoy. There's a ton of accurate historical detail woven into his books, along with some mild humor and some very taut adventure. The characters are pleasantly drawn, but they are all of them men & boys (or very nearly so) as befits his subject matter. O'Brian's knack for describing ordinary humans and how they behave is well above average, so his characters feel real enough, but he's no Melville and doesn't tempt one to make the comparison.

Sounds good, thanks.

Only read half a dozen of the Aubrey maturin books but they were pretty much perfect afaict and I mean to return to them when we get childcare back (lol pandemic) and I can read the print versions (the audiobooks are dreadful. Same goes for Wodehouse btw.)

Really? Thought I found a good Wodehouse audiobook once.

I think I struggle with comedy in audiobooks rather than it was an especially bad performance of the text

The more a book relies on style the less an audiobook will do the job imo, especially if you've read the author before and thus have a voice in yr head already.

I've never listened to an audiobook

I finished Anna Tsing's 'The Mushroom at the End of the World' this morning. Still plowing through the Prynne chapbooks from the past year, though am unsure as to what will be my next morning read... Tsing's book was perfect because I could read a chapter with breakfast and coffee, and it sort of carried me through my day nicely.

I've never listened to an audiobook

Audiobooks read by the author can be amazing; Spike Milligan's war memoirs for example.

I'm not making a value judgment, btw. Just stating something about myself...I also read mostly poetry and non-fiction, tho, so there might be a dearth of options for me.

I ditched Heaven's Breath, the book about the wind, about 70% of the way through it. It was a mass of poorly integrated facts, many of which were moderately interesting, but none of which were developed into anything longer than a Mark Trail cartoon. The author also had a bad habit of overstatement and drawing unjustifiably broad conclusions from a single suggestive fact.

I finally realized that I wouldn't retain any of what I was reading and trying to retain it all would have required at least five times the time and effort I was willing to expend.

I went straight into the ancient potboiler The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan and finished more than half last evening. It has some shameless anti-semitism in the first several pages and calls the fictional leader of Greece a "Dago", but I just winced and went on with the story, which is swift paced and a bit silly.

I finished Amis' I Like It Here, another cranky-funny-misanthropic short novel about how awful foreigners are.

just started One Thousand Ships, which is about the 5th Iliad-adjacent thing i've read in the last 2 years (without having read the "original")

finished north and south (thanks to lily dale for encouragement to persist). at times a little bit centrist in its politics (the unmoored "the right way is half way between the two 'extremes'" variety of centrism) but a good yarn nontheless. "darkshire" was a bit fucking much as a name though tbh!

now finishing up how to do nothing by jenny oddell which is already a little dated in places and the prose is very plodding and academic, but it's got a lot to say and i would recommend it (or at least chapter 1, which is available here https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb).

i already know how to do nothing

https://d2e111jq13me73.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/styles/share_link_image_large/public/screenshots/csm-movie/cvaokxq83fxpmhfdw5894rq510f.jpg

the ring and the book, which i have never read.

just read the first three lines and it’s such a delight to be back in the distinctive company of browning.

Do you see this Ring?
‘T is Rome-work, made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)


the opening interrogation, the sense of being accosted by someone in the street, sonic and intellectual spring and delight of “Castellani’s imitative craft”, unfurling a suggestive world of what i will call anachronistically “borgesian magic”, the sense of stumbling upon a hidden alley of history, opening into unexpected piazzas.

and also of course the slightly ludicrous such as the phrase

“sundry amazing busts”

which feels like a good love island line.

I've picked up The Ring and the Book twice in the last three years. I did read the Pope's monologue.

and the colour and interlingual sound effects of the last line here - “gl” being one of the loveliest italian sounds, softer than english makes it.

A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed web
When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
Now offered as a mat to save bare feet
(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost)
treading the chill scagliola bedward : then

and the glory of that “then”! and the typical household economy of the moan about cost, reminiscent of up at the villa down at the square, and the resonant simplicity of “when reds and blues were indeed red and blue” - a line that has lasted, for its perfect expression of the vividness of nostalgia.

I've picked up _The Ring and the Book_ twice in the last three years. I did read the Pope's monologue.

i should have glossed the previous excerpt - the narrator is browsing a second hand market in florence (as browning did when he found the original story that provided the framework for the ring and the book) so that “then” actually only leads on to more second hand items, but coming after the brief flight of fancy of “bedward” is a wonderful moment, the small imaginary vignettes that flit through your minds eye in the second hand market.

are you a fan of browning, alfred?

Mightily. "Andrea del Sarto" and "Love Among the Ruins" are two of my favorite 19th century poems.

ah god yes. absolutely that whole period of browning is perfect imo.

the sheer delight of reading words you have not read before by a poet you love.

trust browning to truffle out the legal papers of a three centuries old murder in a second hand market in rome, trust him to see the essential poetry of the case. trust him to offer it to tennyson and others as robert was dealing with the death of elizabeth and moving back to england. trust *them* not to take it up, trust browning to do it years later and really *foreground* the legal aspect in poetry.

<3 <3 <3

Having finished The 39 Steps in a second gulping, I'm now reading The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis, his memoir of the Cretan resistance to the Nazi occupation. It's very much a fragmented series of incidents, small and large, for it was never written for publication in the first place, but it gives a very clear picture of how the resistance operated. Mostly they starved, hid in caves, and lived by their wits.

i mean - sorry aimless xpost - he’s taken *a whole load* of legal documents* and turned them into poetry.

I remember enjoying The 39 Steps (I read it for a great college class called The Paternalistic Thriller), but a while back I tried to read another Buchan and it was so violently racist I put it in the burn box and vowed to never read anything more by him. I can't remember now which one it was.

Buchan was wholly, deeply, reliably gung-ho for the British colonial empire, to the extent he was named governor-general of Canada late in his life. A truckload of racism came along with that kind of jingoism and it definitely shows in his writing. In this case,aving been written in 1915, the main villains of 39 Steps were those nasty German Huns, so the racism was not front and center.

Some of us were discussing Greenmantle(wiki:...the second of five novels by John Buchan featuring the character of Richard Hannay, first published in 1916 by Hodder & Stoughton, London. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War, the other being Mr Standfast (1919); Hannay's first and best-known adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), is set in the period immediately preceding the war.) on another thread, which I can't remember the title of, but do recall it was quite a time-trip, beyond dated in some respects, but can pull you in--be sure to get an edition with lots of footnotes, though. One of the main characters may have been based on Buchan's schoolmate, or fellow alum, T.E. Lawrence--who may have something to do with the Wiki article's tie-in to lide, Anthony (2003). Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century.
But o man, there's all sorts of tie-ins, for instance:
Hilda von Einem, a powerful German operative in Turkey. She is a femme fatale who masterminds a plot to stir up a Muslim jihad against the Allies. She has been described as a "glamorous but merciless female agent"[1] and a "pale-blue-eyed northern goddess".[2] Rosie White suggests that von Einem is a "trope loosely based on Mata Hari" and that she represents a "decadent, oriental sexuality...Lewis Einstein's book Inside Constantinople: A Diplomatist's Diary During the Dardanelles Expedition, April to September, 1915 refers to a German woman agitating the Muslim population in Constantinople, in the mode of Hilda von Einem, so this element of the story may have some factual basis.

I enjoy Browning and quote fragments from him a few times in my next book.

Right now my morning reading is Saidiya Hartman's astonishing 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.'

I've gotten through the Prynne chapbooks, read a few other chaps from Lynn Xu, Rob Halpern, and Lara Durback, and am now flipping between two other books during the day. The first is Ara Shrinyan's 'Flag Mines,' a conceptual poetry work of language taken entirely from a CIA sourcebook describing different countries' flags. The other is a book-length poem by contemporary surrealist poet Carlos Lara, entitled 'The Green Record'

xp Thinking about it some more, I'm pretty sure it was Greenmantle I read for that class, not The Thirty-Nine Steps. I'm not sure which book made me cancel Buchan, but my guess is it was probably Prester John.

reading & nearly done w/ john o'hara's the ewings

never knew much abt o'hara, i read he came somewhat back into fashion due to mad men which makes some sense; this novel def feels outdated in ways but i dig its directness, it is also just v richly drawn in character and dialogue

all I know is Appointment in Samarra

In this case,aving been written in 1915, the main villains of 39 Steps were those nasty German Huns, so the racism was not front and center.

I agree that it isn't in the 39 Steps (though xenophobia is, which ain't much better), but if you read Greenmantle you get to see what Buchan's anti-German sentiments are REALLY about:

That is the weakness of the German. He has no gift for laying himself amongst different types of men. He is such a hard shell being that he cannot put out feelers to his kind. He may have plenty of brains, as Stumm had, but he had the poorest notion of psychology of any of God's creatures. In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises.

Found a copy of the Lillith trilogy by Octavia Butler in a charity shop yesterday. So started into that and read the first few chapters. I'm finding the prose pretty sublime in a way I remember noticing Hilary Mantel's was when i started Wolf Hall.
I think i heard a podcast on this a while back so wish I'd found her stuff earlier. think I will try to read a lot more of her, though somehow haven't read more Mantel despite having picked up several titles.

finished the Merle Haggard mY House Of Memories in order to get some more books out of the library. Quite enjoyed it but should have got to it much sooner. Think I had it out for a year or more.

REad the introduction to Mari Sandoz' Crazy Horse Strange Man of the Oglala.
Tnat is written by a current Sioux and goes into how accurate a portrayal of tribal customs etc she portrays.
Had read first couple of chapters of Cheyenne Autumn earlier in the week. now have a lot more time to read the recent borrowings in so not sure what I'm reading next.

am also in the middle of Michelle Alexander's The New jim Crow which is pretty great.

& Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life
recognising some situations that every marginalised person goes through.
THink it's an interesting read so hope I get through it soon. it's my loo book at the moment so I'm not giving it as much concentrated time as maybe I should.

xpost in one of his memoirs, Graham Greene said that, after World War I, he set out to write thrillers that went past/vs. Buchan's pro-Empire and associated bullshit.

Where there was just this implicit, unquestioning faith in Empire, at least publicly, and all the stuff that came from and with that.

Yeah, Greene is part of a tradition which also includes Le Carré and, according to some on this board, Ambler, that takes the espionage adventure aspect of Buchan and adds critique of the empire. The other approach, of course, culminated with James Bond (not my cup of tea).

In that same memoir (think it was A Sort of Life), Greene credited this guy with encouragement, by example, in a shared attitude, messing with conventions of genre and world view---note that they both wrote "literary novels" and what they called "entertainments":
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart HFRSE (30 September 1906 – 12 November 1994) was a Scottish novelist and academic. He is equally well known for the works of literary criticism and contemporary novels published under his real name and for the crime fiction published under the pseudonym of Michael Innes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._I._M._Stewart

Have never read him, but he earned his niche at least by influencing Greene.

I recently read the Natalia Ginzburg novella "Family" from the collection "Family and Borghesia". So far I've liked everything I've read by her. This novella reminded me a bit of Nikolai Leskov's stories, in the sense that it seems kind of pre-modern, almost like a folk-tale or something from a pre-literate oral tradition of story-telling. There's nothing starchy, conventional or old-fashioned about it. It reads like someone talking about some people that they knew and things that happened to them, in a very matter-of-fact tone, but somehow the emotional punch comes through in the gaps between what is said. Now I'm reading "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson.

I finished The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis. It's a book that demands you be interested in the bits and bobs of how the resistance operated in Crete during WWII, but I find Greek village culture interesting enough that I was up to meeting those demands.

Not sure what to pick up next. I dabbled around in The Anatomy of Melancholy for a bit before bed, but it isn't the sort of book one reads cover to cover.

It had to happen sometime. I started reading Across the Street, a Simenon I checked out of the library and it was... bad. The first purely unreadable Simenon title I've encountered so far.

I next turned to The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson, a book of essays largely revolving around her admiration for the thought and writings of John Calvin. She is a careful thinker and writer, but these are a bit formless, in that she does not just propose a thesis and develop it, but allows her thoughts to follow themselves without requiring them to follow a linear development. Kind of nice to read someone worth listening to who is coming from that perspective.

Ginzberg has been my big discovery, o. nate

liked Robinson's Housekeeping but still haven't read Gilead

recently read Gore Vidal's Julian, which was an interesting account of the savagery of the 2nd Century struggle between Hellenism and Christianity

thought Rumaan Aman's Leave the World Behind was interesting

Julian is one of Vidal's good novels.

I'm coming up on the home stretch of Milenko Jergovic's Kin.. It is utterly extraordinary,.

I read Hugh Kenner's essay 'Joyce's *Portrait* Reconsidered' (1965).

Brilliant, insightful, incisive. Quite early in making strong links between Joyce and Wilde.

But also wilful and excessive in pursuing certain motifs (an Aristotelian idea of potentialities missed), and a very odd way of talking about 'Dublin' as though it's a universal thing, ie: meaning 'the city you can't escape from'. This is unhelpful: if he wants to talk about an abstract concept he should do that, if Dublin then he should do that, with more thought about what was *actually* happening in Dublin at this time and all the people who *didn't* feel a need to escape from it, but rather sought to transform it.

I next turned to The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson, a book of essays largely revolving around her admiration for the thought and writings of John Calvin

I love Gilead but I have less than zero interest in it as a text on Calvinism so I'm guessing these would not be for me.

I'm guessing these would not be for me.

You might be pleasantly surprised. This is not, as you might think, a paean to the stern, dour face of puritanism and predestination. But I won't try to speak for her.

I needed something familiar and propulsive so I'm re-reading London Orbital by Iain Sinclair. I made my peace with him being an obscurantist and a charlatan years ago (I'm sure he'd find it a compliment) and I still get a thrill from the way he navigates places and libraries and the way he builds scenes out of shards of photography and memory. His prose style is something too as he has unashamedly absorbed the benzedrine Beat rhythms and achieves an incantatory rush that I find intoxicating (but I can totally see why others find him ridiculous). I'm wary of reading him before bed as I find I need a brain sluice or his style invades my dreams.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. I read a third in one evening and thought was good edgy fun, if not exactly wise then interesting and somewhat thoughtful. Last night I read another third and thought it was narcissistic nonsense. Who knows what tonight will bring!

Read to the end of Dawn the first book in Octavia Butler's Lillith's Brood omnibus .
Quite enjoying it , do like the writing there's really something delicious about it. I have seen some people say this is the one book by her they like the least so wonder what order to read her in as I intend to read her more Just so happened that this was the first book of hers i actually noticed being on local charity shop shelves so wonder if I have just missed things before. I found Toni Morrison'[s Beloved in the same charity shop last weekend after having just been back to another shop I'd seen it in a couple of months ago. & got Lovecraft Country from there last week too. So left wondering if I just haven't been as aware of some writers work being in front of me as I scan shelves as I would like. Still stuck with the thing of continually wanting more books so having loads on the go and also loads in my waiting to be read piles. Which maybe isn't the best way of organising things.
Anyway glad I've discovered Ocatavia Butkler now.

Mari Sandoz Cheyenee Autumn
HIstoric trek of Cheyenne group to attempt to return to traditional lands from a shoddy reservation that they had just been fobbed off with having been told they could always go back to the traditional lands if they didn't like teh new place. It's told as a novel, I'm not sure if that is the writing style she stuck with elsewhere. I also have her Crazy Horse out at the moment though i have only read the introduction.
Do enjoy the writing style. More than i thought I might even. She was writing in the middle of the 20th century and isn't actually from an Indian background though it appears there were Indian people around as she did grow up so she grew up with some knowledge of the culture.
Which means she has more sympathy towards the people than a lot of Americans at the time would have had. Good book .

Steven H Gardner Another Tuneless Racket Volume One
Book on punk by an American writer that I bought some months ago and was lying by the bed. I think this was what I was reading before i got heavily into reading anti racism work. It was reviewed in Ugly THings a couple of issues ago. Very interesting. He's just going through what Punk means and how it was covered in the press etc. What was going on musically immediately beforehand. & not liking the purist year zero attitude to music that some scribes had and tried to pass on at the time since it wasn't true of the papers that were covering things. Also not liking the way that 'selling out' was such a big deal and fueled criticism of the Clash among others.
Also the way that people who were not in the punk meccas experienced the music primarily on record since there were not major punk gigs happening everywhere at the time.
Interesting insight anyway and good to have another punk overview from a different perspective. I think this is original enough that it is not just another book on the subject per se.

coming to the end of Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life which I think is great.

"The Haunting of Hill House" was an enjoyable read. The premise of young strangers being thrown together for a short stay in the country reminded me of summer camp, though this is a camp organized by a professor with an interest in the supernatural and a novel theory of cursed architecture. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a house can be so badly designed that staying in it can be a threat to one's mental wellbeing. The mood starts off with jollity as the awkward childlike loner Eleanor falls hard for the gregarious, too-cool-for-school Theodora (aka Theo, who the book hints, may be a lesbian), and the characters laugh off the creepy aspects of the house in a manner that won't be unfamiliar to anyone who's watched an episode of Scooby Doo. But the relationship blows hot and cold, as Eleanor needs more constancy than the flighty Theo can provide, and the goings on in the house get harder to explain from a strictly architectural standpoint. Soon the professor's wife appears to provide some needed comic relief, but we are already beginning to doubt whether the third-person limited POV is strictly reliable, and perhaps some things we thought we saw were only in a character's mind? It seems that these ambiguities and their disorienting effect on the reader are part of the show. By the end, we've no doubt that something weird has happened, but whether the explanation is supernatural or only strictly psychological would be fodder for book club debates. The queasy feeling of slipping into madness though is resonant and memorable.

otm

I think Theo is quite forcefully coded as queer, and that part of the relationship drama is about Eleanor developing feelings for the male investigator. But I might be remembering the film more on that second count.

I finished Blood Meridian and liked it quite a bit. Better than The Road at least. Both books left me with a queasy feeling.

I have Book of the New Sun, which I might start, but I've never read any of the Elric books and thought I might grab a couple of those.

I got a library card and started reading The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, a sweeping magical-realist epic of colonialism & its afterlives on the Zambezi River.

i recently finished Dawn by Octavia Butler too. I don't know much else about her stuff beyond a graphic novelisaiton of Kindred, but I did really enjoy it. There are some genuinely icky bits to it.

xxp In the Gilead novels, black swan to black sheep to prodigal Jack goes from disruptive child-and-teenhood to disrupted adulthood of a kind, coming to take the specter of predestination into/the seed ov his late-blooming sense of self-regulation and self-torture. Kinda sucks for him, better for society, at least most of the time, as he gets older. So. whatever Robinson may say elsewhere, as an artist, she leaves us to our own thoughts re Calvinism, tracking Jack and those he affects.
I went straight from the whole New Sun tetraology to Elric, which seemed pretty dry by comparison, but it was probably too soon. Was very impressed by the former, but forgot virtually all of it long ago. Still want to read The Old Drift.

70 pages to go of TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980.

Though it's still not actually well written, I must admit that it has become more interesting as the plot has become more outlandish. A painter cutting off his hand, his gf suddenly having an affair with another major character, an unknown nephew turning up from another continent - the daft story is managing to hold the attention.

I finish it at last. It's been an effort.

There are some good ideas or signs of promise in this novel. The way that the text breaks off into titled sections that describe a scene or character, for instance, shows some inventiveness with form. The theme of synaesthesia remains the most original in it. But the writing at the end is often as poor as ever, and dangerously sentimental.

The Acknowledgements are very effusive, calling one person after another the most amazing and inspiring that the author has known. It's like what an English person's parody of an effusive American used to be like; like an Oscars speech. It makes me think: I wish one or two of these people could have helped to make this novel slightly better.

I went camping last week, taking two books to read.

One of them was a collection of "occasional pieces" by William Golding called The Hot Gates. I read about four of these pieces and gave up on it. It has all the marks of a book that was rushed out to capitalize on his Nobel Prize in 1983 (which was an ill-advised choice by the Nobel committee imo). A dud.

The other book was a sci-fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, Rocannon's World. Judged beside her best books, this one is rather pedestrian, with adventures falling thick and fast, but the characters are barely there and the connective tissue that binds it all together is rather weak. It does benefit from her disciplined imagination, which weaves together elements stolen borrowed from other cultures and times and transposes them onto other worlds with an overlay of super-advanced technology.

I'm now pretty far into reading A Death In The Family, which goes from the "Chambray"-like preface---not turning over in bed, but a nocturnal overview and slow track of Daddies with hoses on the front lawn, Mamas finishing up in the kitchen and sitting down on the front porches, kiddies screaming triumphantly out back and along the side yards, sidewalks, as the time traveler tunes back
waay back in to the locusts ov "Knoxville, Summer 1915" (set to music by Samuel Barber)---and then, somewhat like the later development of Swann's Way, proceeding through plausibly recollected interactions of the autobiographically-based child, Rufus (Agee's middle and family name) with other family members, and then to interpolated thoughts and deeds of the adults, alone and together, building to a long 24 hours, anticipating the possible, not unexpected death of one member, then the much less likely, but eventually confirmed death of another--the living room gradually filling up with news and adults and dynamics as the children sleep upstairs: this chapter isn't all that long, but I had to set the book aside for a couple of days, and catch my breath. The shifts of viewpoint reminded me a little of "As I Lay Dying" and some Delmore Schwartz stories, but I say that to talk myself down a little, find the banister as I go back in.

"Combray," sorry

I am reading The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes and it's great but it is STRESSING ME OUT; I've realized I'm really bad at reading stressful things these days.

I return to David Thomson: TRY TO TELL THE STORY. Increasingly I feel it's Thomson ... at his best? Well, maybe not quite his best, but on characteristic form: wry, droll, speculative confiding.

re-reading 'little, big' after nearly 30 years

not a lot actually happens, but it not-happens very pleasantly, perhaps even . . . eligiacally

is the holy roman empire reborn? difficult to say. at least we know that people with one eyebrow have special powers

people with one eyebrow have special powers

Ant Davis confirms this

I have The Expendable Man waiting for me at the library - you've not sold it to me, Lily Dale!

I'm midway through Altai by Wu Ming, a sequel of sorts to Q by Luther Blisset. The latter I remember as being a wild mix of historical fiction, political allegory, action and adventure, and conspiracy tinged spy thriller. This has the politics and history but so far none of the fun.

Thanks for persuading me to give the Agee a go, dow. I worried it would have clotted prose.

200 pages into Jerusalem. Every chapter is from a different perspective, I hope he circles back to known characters at some point - damn thing is a thousand pages, and Girl Woman Other pulled the trick of a character a chapter so well that this suffers a bit in comparison. I'm not signed up to the "only write about the experiences of ppl in yr own socio-cultural category" line of thinking, the act of writing fiction is after all about inhabiting someone else (main reason I never felt capable of it) but I can't deny that the chapters coming from the perspectives of working class white bohemian boomers feel very real and lived in and the chapters from the perspective of, say, a mixed race sex worker or a black man in the 19th century...less so.

i read sam riviere - dead souls, and oli hazzard - lorem ipsum

the riviere was great, felt like a big joke, and reminiscent of something i couldn't put my finger on (not really thomas bernhard whom several reviews have mentioned); the hazzard not so much, there were things to like in it, but i think 'never mention brexit in a novel' was correctly on elmore leonard's ten rules for writing

i also picked up blake butler's alice knott again, which i got to about halfway through some months ago, very beautiful book, one of those that you want to read slowly

Hi Alfred, there are a few clots and knots, bum notes, from time to time, but he doesn't try to justify them, as jazz musicians are sometimes encouraged to do (supposedly); he goes on to something else, incl, straight through and past the thing of overloading childhood's POV w an a adult adept's articulation---while tapping into inchoate early impressions and emotions, usually a justifiable effort here---one dream-to-nightmare bit I could live without--but he just keeps going: like I thought the night of adults dealing with the news of death would be followed with telling the children, but instead we go back to his being gaslighted by older boys, who have gotten bored and obscurely guilty, but have come up with "a new formula," to be revealed--meanwhile, Rufus has just met his mountain grandfather's grandmother (? started having 'em young, I reckon---premise is worth going with)

Thanks!

Started reading Lovecraft Country and got a few chapters in.

Aklso started into Beloved by Toni Morrison

& the Peter Principle the original book that the phenomenon of people getting promoted to the point if their incompetence got its name from .

Coming to the end of Sara Ahmed's living A Feminist Life

& started Paul Ortiz's African American & LatinX People's HIstory Of the US

& its hot so I'm not reading as much as I was

Just finished reading "Remains of the Day" by Ishiguro. It's a very clever book. The way Ishiguro has the narration proceed simultaneously on two levels (the narrator himself who is seemingly oblivious to or at least deeply alienated from his own feelings, and the subtext of what is really going on, which is artfully revealed to the reader) is done so naturally and seamlessly that any attempt to describe it fails to do it justice. The effectiveness of this literary parlor trick depends on the seeming artlessness of the narration. So the style is allowed to be rather starchy, which is fine, but can grow tiresome at novel length. Perhaps it would've been more effective as a novella.

Git through th e big story in LOecraft Country and now the one about Letitia's house. Interesting to see what they've changed for the tv series. Not sure what the Ruby story is as yet seemed to be more fleshed out in the tv series and I don't remember teh brother Marvin being in the show.
I think they integrated teh big story more into having things happening before and around it didn't they?

Anyway good read and i must get around to reading some of the actual black Lovecraft influenced writing.

Want to add a little to what I said a week ago: xxp In the Gilead novels, black swan to black sheep to prodigal Jack goes from disruptive child-and-teenhood to disrupted adulthood of a kind, coming to take the specter of predestination into/the seed ov his late-blooming sense of self-regulation and self-torture. Kinda sucks for him, better for society, at least most of the time, as he gets older. So. whatever Robinson may say elsewhere, as an artist, she leaves us to our own thoughts re Calvinism, tracking Jack and those he affects.I Calvinism may be considered to keep a lid on Jack (who is still a walking caution sign to all), but the pressure of said lid keeps the ontology bubbling, sometimes rising---he can't really live in submission or comformity to snything but his own nature, but in response to the world, now that he's tuned into some of it, no longer just kicking it away, having made his selection of stolen settlement; that's no longer good enough.

O.Nate: I like THE REMAINS OF THE DAY and I don't feel that it's too long. KI's later novel THE UNCONSOLED really is long - about 500pp - and I did feel that about it! But I have read REMAINS several times and I never felt it outstayed its welcome.

I read THE LOST LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN, a book containing many letters to FO'B from famous people.

Then on to Declan Kiberd's first book SYNGE & THE IRISH LANGUAGE (1979 but second edition 1993). What's certain about this book is that it's the most scholarly, solid research that this celebrated critic has ever done. Nothing else I've seen by him compares.

It's not that the book is so long, just that the meticulous, occasionally stilted prose style had a tendency to make me groggy. I guess a calming, soporific effect is part of what a butler's speech should strive for, but it became difficult for me to read very much in one sitting. I was thinking perhaps a bit more shorter work would have less of that issue, but it might just be my own idiosyncratic response. Lots of people seem to find the style of the book hypnotic and beautiful in its way.

remains of the day is perfect imo.

i found the unconsoled very heavy going at the time (as documented in this parish), but it's difficult to think of a book i've thought more about in the past year+ since i've read it.

At last I've started reading a book I've wanted to read for years: W.J. McCormack's FOOL OF THE FAMILY, a life of John Millington Synge.

I like to read books properly and cover to cover, but I'm afraid that won't be the case here. More strategic reading and dipping. But I enjoy it.

The young Synge in Paris was interested in anarchist groups. I'm interested to find out more about how his socialism developed.

Otter Country: In Search of the Wild Otter by Miriam Darlington. I guess it's a pretty good but not mind blowing nature book but the romantic naive foolish part of me wanted to give it to those who want to build more coal fired power stations and nuclear weapons and say 'here's what you're missing'. Could've done with slightly better editing, a couple of repeated sentences and a few too many references to steaming cups of tea.

The only KI I've read is the novellas of Nocturnes, which, despite the classy title, is fairly scruffy, and with a good variety of voices and settings---no Unreliable Narrators that I recall, and I think at least most of the stories are third-person, refreshingly enough (*maybe* one first-person, but he seemed okay: unobtrusive, duh)

Oh meant to say the title comes from the stories being about how music finds its way into-through lives and vice versa

Or anyway each novella has something to do with music.

I read Through A Scanner Darkly, which was oddly beautiful but christ, bleak as all hell. Dick's afterword is pretty shattering.

Now reading more genre fiction: Richard Stark's The Hunter.

Finished Lovecraft Country lkast night and enjoyed i. May need to rewatch the tv series again now that I've read teh source. But am aware of teh differences or at least mos o fthem. Would be interested i further adventures in both.

Started Beloved by Toni Morrison this morning and read the first chapter. Quite delicious prose.

finished Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist life and started reading Paul ortiz's An African American and LatinX People's History of the United States. I hope this is as good as his wife's book from the series. Wound up at a book club discussion of that indigenous olume last Sunday which was interesting.

Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, from New Directions. Just absolutely outstanding stuff.

I'm enjoying the biography of Synge more than I've enjoyed a book in a long time.

Stopped at my favorite bookstore twice in my recent travels, so will be mostly going through that big pile plus my NYRB flash sale purchases.

I think since I last checked in, I've read the following:
Carlos Lara THE GREEN RECORD
Saidiya Hartman, WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS
Cody-Rose Clevidence, FRIEND...
Barbara Guest, QUILL, SOLITARY APPARITION
George Albon, BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES
Liz Waldner, ETYM(BI)OLOGY

The latter three were all read from that big bookstore pile. The Guest and Albon were interesting and worth reading, the Waldner not her finest effort. The first three are all astonishing in their own ways.

I've been reading "Time of Gifts" by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a much after-the-fact account of the ultimate backpacking trip across Europe, in lieu of actually doing any travel this summer. My eyes tend to glaze over at the long passages of what I'll call poetical descriptions of architecture, but I guess that's part of what European travel is about. Some good stories, stylishly told.

A slack time for me. On a recent camping trip I managed several Wodehouse short stories (Jeeves/Wooster) and a Maigret novel by Simenon, Maigret in Montmartre. Both sturdy MOR work by their respective authors.

Tom Scharpling, It Never Ends
Dawnie Walton, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev

I've read a few Maigrets and they all seem relatively MOR. Are there standouts, or is the MOR-ness the point?

Was wondering about that myself

i feel bad about what i said about b.r. yeager earlier (maybe the last thread?), i picked up 'negative space' again and it's gotten into its stride, still not totally my thing but better than i gave it credit for

i also punished myself by reading a couple of kingsley amis novels, 'girl, 20' and the one about the librarian... horrendous

also just read 'the coiled serpent' by camilla grudova, a new one on sam riviere's press, v enigmatic and nasty short story, v good

afaics, the Maigret novels all rely on familiar recurring tropes that Simenon developed early on in the series to create a world that was reliably comfortable for his readers. The best Maigret that I've read so far is Maigret in Society where Simenon stepped further away from the familiar and deliberately placed events in a mileau that made his hero uneasy and the motives and actions of the characters were very strange and unsettling for him.

David Thomson on RED RIVER in TRY TO TELL THE STORY. 'Take 'em to Missouri, Matt'.

McCormack on the PLAYBOY riots in the Synge biography. Hard, in a way, to believe that people rioted over such a play.

What definition of MOR are we going with here? Maigret ain't noir or anything, but I find him less mor than, say, Agatha Christie.

Read JL Carr's 'A Month in the Country' and was really impressed, looking forward to getting my hands on some of his other books. Interesting character, too!

I'm operating at low wattage rn, so I'm reading a pop history about European presence in North America/Carribean prior to 1620 called A Voyage Long and Strange, Tony Horwitz. It alternates between describing that history, mostly Spanish or French explorations, and the author's minimally amusing adventures in ~2006-7, going to various sites where those explorations took place and meeting locals of varying degrees of eccentricity. It's OK.

Stamped From The Beginning Ibram X Kendi.
The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas In America.
Another book on racism by the Author and Podcaster and a good one.
It's layed out as biographies of 7 significant figures since the 16th century.But that is more to shape things into epistemology current to the figure or something to 5hat effect.
Hadn't realised that Quakers had at one point been slave owners and vehement about supporting the cause. Not sure why. I thought they were more freethinking but that doesn't necessarily translate to abolition etc.

I finished David Thomson's HOW TO TELL THE STORY at last.

Ultimately it's marvellous - better at the end than the start, building to extraordinary climax, as he goes to Brixton film school, takes his lost love to a private screening of CITIZEN KANE, then reflects at the end on what his memoir has left out. No-one else could have written this. Curious that it's so neglected or little-known in his oeuvre.

John Millington Synge, THE TINKER'S WEDDING (first produced 1909). This is the play of Synge's that I have failed to recall; it seems to be seen as an odd one out, isn't revived as much as the others. I can't really say that this two-act play is a great classic, but what's notable is its impiety. It ends with the rather proud and mercenary priest being practically tied up in a sack! Seems more explosive for the Ireland of its time than the PLAYBOY.

My reading of the biography of Synge, FOOL OF THE FAMILY, is rather non-linear - I now find myself going backwards through earlier chapters, but I suppose that shows that its interest for me has grown, the more I've read.

A remarkable fact about Synge, who died aged 37: it's not clear that he ever had a sexual encounter. Yet his plays are full of life and quite a lot of desire.

Nearly finished Circe by Madeline Miller. Never really cared too much for Greek mythology (the little I know) but this is cracking, as it's an incredibly human - and feminist - retelling. By contrast I'm working though Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes and it's much less enchanting, though it's not really fair to compare fic vs non fic.

Read JL Carr's 'A Month in the Country' and was really impressed, looking forward to getting my hands on some of his other books. Interesting character, too!

Great novel. Can recommend The Harpole Report and How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup as being similarly great reads. Love his style. Maybe the most pleasingly comforting writer I’ve ever read.

Agree with both of these, I’m sorry to report that I enjoyed Harpole & Foxberrow General Publishers far less.

MMiller's Song Of Achilles is good too, her redoing of the iliad, focussed more on Patroclus. and Hayne's One Thousand Ships is the same but pretty much skips all the male action.

(natalie's Stands Up For The Classics is what prompted me to read all these. the trojan war episode, which she's currently touring as Troy Story (arf) is here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000d7p2 )

Myth Baby podcast by a Canadian feminist classical mythology fan has been really good. I should try to catch up with it more. But I did stick with it from the beginning to a bit of the way through the pandemic and heard her take on a lot of the greats of Greek mythology.
She references both of the books mentioned above plus a few others.

Couldn't think of the full name when I was on the bus. BUt it's Let's Talk About Myths Baby in full with Liv Albert as presenter
https://open.spotify.com/show/6S9jAhlyZtr5dj2tqYXeJ6?si=3f142771d3724dcc

Been hitting a lot of middlebrow bestseller fiction a lot lately, it's the best my brain can manage while trying to take care of a toddler. Kate Atkinson's BIG SKY was exactly the sort of memorable-but-undemanding whodunnit I wanted to read, and wore its complexity lightly and with good humour. I filled in my head background cast with actors from Ted Lasso.

I was impressed enough that I picked up TRANSCRIPTION which is literally (it's acknowledged in the afterword) "What if Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald, but also spies" and is a very readable ambitious failure.

Also picked up Oliver Harris's (not middlebrow) new thriller ASCENSION, which I'm really looking forward to.

I pretty much always enjoy Kate Atkinson, with the exception of A God in Ruins which I HATED. Of her mysteries, I think I like When Will There Be Good News? best. Plus it has an awesome title.

Good to know. Was impressed enough by Big Sky that I’ll go read the Brodie books from the start

When Will There Be Good News? -- is that a quotation from something? eg a Medieval Christian text?

"middlebrow bestseller fiction"

I quite like this idea. As previously noted, I read two or three novels this year that I came to realise were readable and enjoyable in that way. Why not?

The Way Home Tales from A Life Without Technology Mark Boyle
started reading th ebegining of thsi snad got a couple of chapeters in. Seems to be written in a clear, easily read and understood way.
So far Boyle has introduced himself and talked about his project of living without money which extended from a year long project to lasting 3 years then being approached by an editor with this idea. So he's bought a place in rural Galway county but become too tempted by the power linked existing house that he's moved into so let that to some misfits who also want to get back to teh country. & has built himself a shack outof wood and straw bales and things. Had to carry the main tree which is the source of teh wood with some of these other residents.
The project this time is to live without technology. he has been saying that the definition of technology is so broad that all implements and tools may be included if not clarified. I think I haven't come across his full clarification yet but I'm pretty early in the Book.
Well have meant to read this for teh last few years. I think I was at the launch in the local bookshop where he talked and read from this.
I think I had his book on living without money out of teh library a couplk eof years ago too but didn't get very far into it before I had to return it because of another request.

Stamped From The Beginning Ibram X Kendi
Have got into the Thomas jefferson section and looked at his version of racism. This also looked at the dismissal of black intelligence despite experiments to see if Africans put through Europ[ean education showed similar results and abilities. But easy to impose ideas of exceptionalism for those who this is tried out on.
I like the author and his podcast. I need to read whatever i can get hold of by him.

An African American and LatinX History of teh United States Paul Ortiz
good parallel with his wife's work on Indigenous population. I'm enjoying this so far. May get around to teh other 3 volumes in the Penguin Revisioning series and hope it does expand to other geographical areas and marginalised populations.

if you want female take on the Iliad then The Silence of the Girls is cheap on amz or kobo today. i think the other two are perhaps better but maybe only because i read this last.

(pat barker has a sequel out in what is a strangely crowded market)

I'm a fan of Pat Barker's Regeneration so that's worth a punt, cheers!

My interests have naturally led me to somewhere I should really have gone long ago: R.F. Foster's vast biography of W.B. Yeats, on my shelves for years.

Its size looks forbidding, but it's remarkably easy to dip into. Not intellectually demanding, mostly just a lot of gossip - who WBY has fallen out or in with in a given month.

Doubtful that I'll manage a whole consecutive reading of it, though.

Yeats will likely have to wait, as my father has just lent me John le Carré's THE PIGEON TUNNEL, which I have him for his birthday. 40 pages in, and the anecdotal storytelling is inviting from the start. The comparison with Thomson's memoir will be hard to resist.

[*which I GAVE him for his birthday]

trying to see if calibre would generate me a decent list but i just got a csv dump with the books and the columns in no particular order, which needs more work

anyway, cr Sketches By Boz, the 18th of the 18(?) penguin classics Dickens that they redid the covers of in 2009(?) to be based on engravings from the originals. it's good earliest thing, and is short sketches and stories, that only a completist would care about, really. the most famous one might be his description of Seven Dials. (i think there are 3 more that didn't get new covers, his journalism)

also worth noting is that penguin classics have had a bit of a redesign and the stripe is now wider, the penguin bigger and has lost its orange border and doesn't match the old style. luckily i managed to find a copy matching the other 17 so i don't have an odd one at the end.

last month was One Thousand Ships and Amber Fury by Natalie Haynes, the first a retelling of the iliad from the perspective of all the females, and the second about a classics teacher in Edinburgh. after that it was a couple of things mentioned by said classics teacher, aclestis by Euripides and agamemnon by aeschylus, both of which are short.

Summerwater, Sarah Moss - heavily hyped in the LRB and elsewhere (here, maybe?). Middle class tourists spend a miserable time in cabins at a Scottish loch during a torrential downpour. Occasionally very funny, but perhaps a bit too invested in its mission as a State Of The Nation novel. Could also be that I'm just not quite British or middle aged enough yet to fully understand. Does that thing where every chapter is from a different perspective - third book I've read this year to do this, the others being Girl Woman Other and Jerusalem.

Paranormality Why We See What Isn't There Professor RIchard Wiseman
book sceptical of the supernatural that sees some benefits deriving from the study of the subject.
Or taht is to say why people understand what is presented to them as being paranormal or supernatural in the way that they do.
So far I've read the first chapter which is on Fortune Telling so talks about Cold Reading . Also goes into things like The Amazing Randi who wasa stage conjuror and illusionist who had a mission to expose all teh fake use of the supernatural, like fake mediums etc. I t6hink he also regularly beheaded Alice Cooper onstage.
I guess a lot of this is going to be pretty straightforward debunking of false belief in ways that I have come across before. I think I picked it up for that reason and it being a one stop shop for a lot of this. BUt does seem to be presented coherently in a semi interesting manner.

Cheyenne Autumn Mari Sandoz
back to this . May be reading too many things at teh same time. BUt am enjoying her writing. Should have been aware of it much earlier.
Historical novel from a marginalised area. I am trying to educate myself on the actuality of the Indian in America. THis book turned up mentioned in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States when I hadn't expected it to be. I thought it was as whi8te saviour as the movie turned out to be. So glad i found out it isn't really. She does have some nice turns of phrase and insights into motivations etc.
Worth reading her stuff i think.

I don’t think I hyped summerwater but I read it and thought it was … ok. Probably better than her first.

I finished "Time of Gifts" by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the first half of the story of his walk across Europe as a young man in the 1930s. It's an amazing adventure in many ways. He was 19 years old, alone, on foot, with only about 4 British pounds per month to live on, being mailed ahead by a friend to consulates in the cities where he planned to stop. Its hard to imagine in this age where even in the remotest small towns there is probably an internet connection how truly on his own he was. However it was also an age of a much different standard of hospitality for travelers. Apparently there was a German custom (law?) where you would be given a coupon for free lodging for a night in just about any town or village by applying with the burgomaster upon arrival. He often relied on that. However, he also had an astonishing ability to parlay chance encounters into incredibly generous invitations, and so he ended up spending a lot of the trip staying in the castles of the minor nobility or wealthy families of British expatriates, now somewhat reduced in means in the aftermath of the Great War, but still quite willing to put up a charming, flamboyant young man with a gift for languages and a fierce curiosity about European history and culture. The thing that made the book a bit heavy going at times for me was the density of technical terms of Central European dress, art, architecture, etc. and the thicket of obscure historical allusions. Leigh Fermor is given to conveying his sense of wonder as a young man by these scintillating and extremely learned passages (artificially aided, one suspects, by the many years of study intervening between the experience and the telling), which I mostly skimmed rather than looking up the unfamiliar terms.

Good report o. nate, sounds a very interesting subject - those isolated towns and the older model of hospitality, perhaps a relic of many centuries past.

I love the bit in that one where he gets hammered in Munich and loses his notebook.

accidentally read 2 horny books in a row during summer vacation

portnoy's complaint - philip roth i just laughed and laughed all throughout this one. the part where he goes to visit his wasp gf's parents in idaho and compares them to his own family had me dying. my family on my mother's side is jewish, dad's WASP, and even though i'm like 4 generations younger than roth it was spot on. first thing i've read by him, instantly picked up sabbath's theater at a used bookshop when i got back into town. feel hooked in a fun way

darryl - jackie ess picked this up because everyone on twitter was raving about it. ime things i get recommended from twitter are often bad, but this was excellent. great pervy short comic novel. a 40-year old man living in western oregon undergoes a sexual awakening, emerging stumblingly from a (somewhat reluctant) "cuck" addicted to ghb into an idiosyncratic queer-trans-poly love triangle. even though the author is trans, and the secondary characters include lesbians, bdsmers, gangbangers and transwomen, the book takes places almost exclusively outside the 'queer scene' and darryl's characterization is utterly convincingly suburban-middlebrow. and yet it's not played for satire at all. i quickly found myself, kind of in love with darryl? in awe of evenhandedness, his gentleness, almost buddhist capacity to take things in stride. the prose reminded me of elect mr robinson for a better world by donald antrim in the way it plays with a 'naive' or simplistic character's voice narrating dark or x-rated subject material. i can't stop thinking about it, want everyone to read it

sabbath's theater is great, you will love it i think

darryl sounds good i will check it out

One of Them by Musa Okwonga, an Eton college memoir. A series of snapshots rather than a day to day chronicle it nevertheless gives an insight into being one of the few black students at Eton as well as more generally growing up black in the UK, and how Eton perpetuates privilege and inequality. Pretty good at putting the boot into members of the current government though it never names names, even BJ with his 'fact free bluster, preening confidence and amoral swagger' is just 'the current prime minister'.

Finished Summerwater. Ending is pointless, and she can't write from a child's pov for shit. Still, some chapters were very funny.

I only ever call BJ 'the current UK PM'.

Though I sometimes add words like 'disgusting' and 'foul'.

I've known Jackie for almost a decade, 'Darryl' is indeed brilliant, and her next book is promising to be equally wild and excellent.

Also important to note that a main plot point in Darryl is directly referencing Dennis Cooper's 'The Sluts.'

I've known Jackie for almost a decade, 'Darryl' is indeed brilliant, and her next book is promising to be equally wild and excellent.

― heyy nineteen, that's john belushi (the table is the table), Tuesday, August 10, 2021 3:44 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

so so so stoked for it

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym - recent LRB article on her and, true to form, within the first couple chapters we have a spinster, a priest and an anthropologist.

Oddly I heard, once, that that book was disappointing and didn't live up to expectations.

Is it, in fact, good?

It’s very good indeed, indeed

Thanks for the notice about the Batbara Pym LRB article, which I hadn't seen. It's a good read, perceptive, and entertainingly snooty even when wrong (to say "there is no challenge to male power" in Pym's novels is an unfathomably terrible reading). The Nazi stuff was a bit of a shocker, but I guess it makes the Wodehouse comparisons more apt.

tao lin leave society. enjoying it, though i would absolutely hate to encounter tao lin in the wild as he is obsessively pilled on literally every bit of homeopathic, natural medicine bullshit going

I continue with Foster's Yeats, covering the years c.1900-1909 or so.

WBY seems obnoxious, but can also be terrifically quotable. But even better are his many enemies and critics, who keep serving up superbly aimed malicious descriptions of him.

Looking for easy familiarity, I just re-read Desolation Island, Patrick O'Brian. It delivered. Now I am reading A Coffin for King Charles, C.V. Wedgewood, in a cheap paperback Time-Life books reissue. It might be considered as a companion piece to her bio of Cromwell I read a few years back.

She presents the events and personalities surrounding the trial and execution of Charles I quite clearly. Remarkably, she gives the so-called Levelers a quite sympathetic treatment, but they lacked the power to push even one of their reforms past the small landed gentry and bourgeoisie who controlled the Army and the "Rump" Parliament, so they soon are pushed to the margins of the action.

I tried “master and commander” again recently and I still enjoy the character stuff, and still get utterly lost at the “hoist the mainsail” business, especially when there is absolutely acres of it.

A quick peek through the later volumes suggests there’s less shipping technical manual stuff, is that accurate?

Finished Camille Roy's 'Honey Mine,' great collection of prose from the underground experimental lesbian writer.

Now trying to figure out what next.

Finished Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn which was pretty good. Better than i had assumed before seeing mention in Roxanne Du8nbar Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States. Very well written I think with some nice turns of phrase. Very bleak though.
& not very well represented by the John Ford movie that borrows the title.
I have her Crazy Horse to read yet which ought to be good. It had a good introduction by a contemporary Navajo writer which says it is . That was good in itself.

Paulo Friere Pedagogy Of the Hope Reliving: Pedagogy Of The Oppressed
The writer of teh book on a more egalitarian education system revisits it a few decades later and goes over the process by which it was written.
My one problem with this so far is that there are a LOAD of endnotes which are all pretty long. Very interesting but very long and giving a lot of background on the context of the text . So I need to work out teh best way of reading both. If i should just read several notes ahead then read teh text so I keep the momentum of the text or vice versa. Almost need 2 books and 2 sets of eyes or something.
But yeah really interesting so far.
But reading either him or Boal who was heavily influenced by him just triggers me to wondering why I gave the local Theatre For change group any of my time since they seem to have very little to do with what they supposedly represent. Seem to have watered things down massively and filtered things through a heavily white understanding. Like they did the direct opposite of what they were supposed to and also seem to have taken the role of teacher in the direct opposite direction than these writers thought hinges on.

Paranormality Why We See What Isn't There Professor RIchard Wiseman
decent popular science type book looking at what can be learnt about the human condition from its responses to fake supernatural and spiritual scams. Why people believe things, what the processes being engaged with are etc etc.
I've come across a lot of this stuff elsewhere but it is a convenient one stop book containing a lot of what is involved.

I've mainly read genre fiction this summer:

Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Don Winslow - The Cartel
Richard Stark - The Hunter
Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
Agatha Christie - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Currently reading Rudiger Safranski's intellectual biography of Nietzsche (very slowly) and Antonia White's Frost in May. The latter - an autobiographical coming of age story, set in a Catholic convent - is extraordinary and so exact and psychologically acute that it reads like an icily precise horror story in places.

I still enjoy the character stuff, and still get utterly lost at the “hoist the mainsail” business

For the 99% of his readers who are not avid nautical historians and eat up that stuff, it's sufficient just to glide past the technical terms, taking them in at the most general level. It's enough to know he's talking about a mast or a sail or some place on the ship that's either on deck or below deck. O'Brian always gives the general reader enough hints about such things to pick up what they need to know not to get lost. Just don't be intimidated by the unfamiliar jargon. In a way, you are meant to be bewildered by how technically complex those ships were. Once you're comfortable with that, it all smooths out.

Paul Halter - The Seventh Hypothesis (1991)
Masako Togawa - The Master Key (1962)

two translated mysteries.

Halter's is heavy on the puzzle element -- when one murder starts to get boring, another one happens. There is a very enjoyable chapter where two old theatre queens keep one-upping each other when discussing which one is a murderer. All of the other characters are blanks.

Togawa's is one of those mindfucks where weird and apparently unrelated things keep happening, followed by around 4 pages of explanation. Quite entertaining, with grotesque characters.

I've been dabbling lately, mostly reading some of Mark Twain's short works from a collection of his sketches, speeches, essays, etc. It's about time to move to something meatier. I'll figure it out tonight. There are a lot of good candidates at hand.

I got Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman from the library and devoured it in a day. It was very good, and I've recommended it to several friends and am looking forward to reading Muraka's other recently translated novel, Earthlings.

Sorta-spoilers: I thought it was pretty dang obvious that Keiko falls somewhere on the autism spectrum, even if she is never labeled or diagnosed as such in the course of the book. I mention that because there seems to be a sharp divide in the reviews I've seen, between A) people who read it as a realistic and warm-hearted portrayal of a person with autism doing her best to navigate a maze of confusing social pressures and expectations, and B) people who think that the book is some sort of broad satire "about" capitalist alienation and that we are not meant to identify or sympathize with Keiko.

I read it two years ago and definitely agree with your assessment.

Reading Open Doors, Leonardo Sciascia. It's more a novella than a novel. So far it is quite slow-paced and contemplative compared with his other works I've read, with a knotty prose style that the translator seems to have struggled to bring over into English. It's in a volume with several other short works of his which I may or may not also read.

Finished Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire.
Have had it out for way too long but it was in a pile on my bed last week so I finally got to it. Seeing somebody has a request out on it. So hope that hasn't dated back too long it kept getting teh loan extended thanks to lockdowns etc.
Anyway did enjoy it but it did have me thinking about abuses of the basic teaching method that I've come across locally.
Glad I've heard about his intentions and what shaped him coming to the processes he wrote about and had further developed through experience.

Inferior Angela Saini
I read this when i was drinking a lot over Xmas last year so think I need to get a clearer reading. Do love her writing and presenting.
It's her book on gender imbalance and the non objectivity of scie3ntific practise that lead to it getting so valorised and so on.

Read "Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened" by Bruce Andrews, a showcase of earlier work from a prolific period in the mid to late 70s. He's a piece of work, apparently, but I find the opacity and resultant associative freedom inherent in his poems to be rather lovely.

Today read Daniel Owens' "Celingak-Celinguk," and Indonesian word which means "look left, look right (in the context of being in a strange place)." It's a translingual book of poems written in both English and Indonesian, with translations on opposing pages. Really interesting work.

I've been reading "The Satires of Juvenal" in the Rolfe Humphries translation from Indiana University Press. I think this is probably the funniest work of classical literature I've yet read, which is some accomplishment. The slangy, anachronistic translation by Humphries is vivid and immediate (he uses anachronistic translations at times to make obscure ancient references more understandable to the reader). Humphries's sense of humor can be illustrated by this Wikipedia anecdote:

Humphries may be best remembered for a notorious literary prank. Asked to contribute a piece to Poetry in 1939, he penned 39 lines containing an acrostic. The first letters of each line spelled out the message: "Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses ass." The editor printed an apology and Humphries was banned from the publication. The ban was lifted in 1941.

I finished the Sciascia novellas a couple nights ago. The second and third were more conventional than the first one I described, then the fourth and final one was a cross between a recap of the history of a particular trial in 1913 and a running commentary on the judicial process and its flaws. All in all an interesting collection of short pieces. Not essential reading, but worth the time spent.

I'm reading "Leave the World Behind" by Rumaan Alam. I've been trying to make better use of my local public library, and I read a review of this that made it sound interesting. So far its been moderately interesting. I'm waiting to see if it gets better.

Rockin the Bronx Larry Kirwan
NOvelk about an Irish youth heading to New York to try to fetch his girlfriend home and starting a band with her tenant.
I picked this up thinking it was a memoir , now not sure to what extent this is pure fiction and what is based on his own history.
Enjoying it anyway.

The Mandarins Simone De Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher etc's novel about the avant garde set in Paris in the wake of the 2nd World War.
Bought thsi a while back and its just kicked around in my front room for way too long. I think I saw it refered to recently so meant to get into reading it and now finding it pretty readable.
Probably should have read everything I bought at teh time i bought it though. But glad i've got to it.

Inferior Angela Saini
British science writer's book on Gender imbalance and how science has been used to perpetuate it. Views science as far from as objective as it makes itself out to be because of the agenda of those practising it.
I read this over Xmas but I think I was drinking a lot at the time so may not have taken it in as much as i could have.
I really like her writing and presentation on various media. I need to read her first book on scienc ein India Geek nation also looking forward to the next book on the Patriarchy whenever that appears.

finished Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire a few days ago.
Enjoyed reading about the process by which he arrived at developing the though and writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed. & what the conno00tations on the understanding should be.
Took me way too long to get around to reading this. I think I had kept renewing it prior to the first lockdown and then had it continually extended automatically because of that. NOt sure what put me off, I found it an easy read when i did finally get to it. & i found out as I was getting through it that somebody had a request out on it so hope they hadn't been waiting too long.

Stamped From The Beginning Ibram X Kendi
History of Racist ideas in Us History. Told in 7 sections each one related to a figure from trhe given time.
I enjoy Ibram X kendi's writing and his podcast.
I find learning the history quit enlightening. Want to get the rest of what he wrote including the compendium he edited . Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

I tried to read Love's Work, Gillian Rose, managed to reach the halfway point and will not read another word of it. I picked it up because another ILBer spoke highly of it. I wish I could speak highly of it, but I can't. A book that I recently read noted that "nothing reveals a person like their book". In this case, the author's self-revelation did not lead to my admiration. It would take a much longer post to explain why this was so and I don't have the heart for that harsh and dismal task.

Jon Savage's crisply written and well-researched Teens, about the development of youth culture from the late 19th century through 1945.

Also: Molly Keane's delicious Good Behaviour (thanks, NYRB classics!).

"Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles" by rosecrans baldwin. very mediocre essays about los angeles. he explicitly states in the introduction that he's not concerned with whether people have said this stuff before, which, well, yes, i can see that.

piranesi by susanna clarke. this was a lot of fun! i recommend it!

the fisherman by john langan. the first half of this was great. incredibly weird. and the framing device(s) are very effective. but when it starts getting into the magical bullshit it's boring.

bury the chains by adam hochschild. history of the british abolition movement. presented as a ripping yarn which that arch/sarcastic way people right about georgian britain, which doesn't really fit the subject.

a paradise built in hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by rebecca solnit. this is unbelievably rambling and rarely on topic, but when it was on topic it was good.

now reading spencer ackerman's "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump", which is a right good laugh so far.

"Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles" by rosecrans baldwin. very mediocre essays about los angeles. he explicitly states in the introduction that he's not concerned with whether people have said this stuff before, which, well, yes, i can see that.

yeah this book was bad!! shame cause the cover/design is good

I mean it’s not like he says anything … wrong per se. It’s just very bad.

it felt like and probably is repurposed magazine articles cut up into prose poems

Yeah the fact that he refers to “reporting” seems like kind of a tell that his goal was to gather quotes and observations and concatenate them.

Now in the homestretch of Afterparties, the new debut book by Anthony Veasna So, b. 1992, d. Dec. 2020: 258 pages of short stories, so far hitting me like My Brilliant Friend and few other things I can think of: rowdy and resplendent and tragicomic and endlessly resourceful, with the excitement of language cruising ghosty dusty Cali "Cambo" life and lives: even-especially when you think you know the kind of thing that will happen and not happen around the next corner, here are more drive-by insights---they seem that right, so far from my own experiences and yet not: pain and pleasure and success and failure as art pop narcotic that leaves you with whatever keys you wake up with this time.
May try to say something more analytical later, but so far it's hard to believe he already did all this, and is already gone.

Also a characteristic memoir in recent Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, so I hope that means there will be at least one more collection.

his goal was to gather quotes and observations and concatenate them. Could work! But apparently not this time.

it can work. it's just not what i read books for i guess.

I'd be interested to hear more, Aimless. I found Love's Work tricky but wasn't repulsed like you seem to have been.

repulsed like you seem to have been

More like a clash of personalities than repulsion.

Her book was essentially an autobiography. As I read the presentation of her self and thought, in her choice of language, I saw she was very carefully creating a mythology from her experience, but she elided so much detail that her experience was never truly present, only a heavily redacted and curated imagery, designed to feel deep and true, but was not grounded in real things. It it felt like she constantly edited and evaded her life in favor of the "lyrical", the idealized, and the intellectually processed version she wanted me to accept. She needed to heed more of Wm. Carlos Williams dictum, "no ideas but in things". I lost patience.

I am now reading The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson. The characters feel very Scandinavian.

I continue to appreciate THE PIGEON TUNNEL. John le Carré writes with such wryness and deftness of his numerous meetings with ambassadors, foreign secretaries, spies, writers, et al. What a life.

It's funny, I just finished Love's Work on Friday morning and enjoyed it for the same reasons you despised it, Aimless. But I tend to believe that we make up our lives and self-mythologize as a means of survival and the natural process of narrativization, whereas you seem to take those elements as deceptive. Super interesting!

I will say that I was expecting something entirely different.

In other news, I recently finished 'No Place on Earth's by Christa Wolf, and it was amazing. Currently reading 'Mon Canard' by the late poet Stephen Rodefer,.and it's quite good.

finishing ‘home land’ by sam lipsyte. kind of like if @dril wrote ‘confederacy of dunces’

I tend to believe that we make up our lives and self-mythologize as a means of survival and the natural process of narrativization, whereas you seem to take those elements as deceptive.

I agree that everyone processes their raw life experience into tidier and more manageable narratives. These narratives often provide the basis for an explanatory personal mythology that is necessarily reductive. My problem with the first half of Rose's book was that she provided so little experiential framework to support her mythos that I never felt she laid a basis for my trusting her judgment. I was simply expected to sit at her feet and accept her version, which included a large dose of implicit self-satisfaction and self-praise, as received wisdom. A little of that goes a long way and by the halfway mark, I'd had more than enough.

I found Rose aloof and self-mythologising but I'm closer to table's interpretation and never found it a turn off. I think the fragmentary nature of it must have been partly down to her cancer diagnosis and her knowing her time was short?

I read Gabor Mate's Scattered Minds and found it revelatory. I have a son with some severe mental health issues, one aspect of which is ADD. Mate's approach is to map the disorder as affecting those with a pathological sensitivity and sees it as a legitimate response to environment; a developmental disorder as much a genetic one, that can be acknowledged and helped with compassion and a deep understanding of how environment can be managed to best aid the development of autonomous and self-regulating human beings. It's beautifully clear and has really helped my understanding of my boy. It's also made me realise just how many of the traits of ADD I share with him.

I also read William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is a perfect miniature.

I near the end of the second half of Foster's Yeats, and once I finish it I should probably read the first half. I greatly enjoy it. But WBY has a lot of preposterous ideas and takes ghosts and spirit mediums literally.

and fascism!

That will be in volume 2.

now reading spencer ackerman's "Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump", which is a right good laugh so far.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, August 27, 2021 2:09 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is outstanding. highly recommended.

I reached the end of Yeats vol 1. And went back to the start, as I hadn't read the first half. So, another 250pp to go.

It's very entertaining, I love it, but the hardback book is so heavy that picking it up and reading a bit always has to be a deliberate event, carefully managed. Not one to take on the bus ... if I was taking any buses.

In that xpost LoA Agee, I also read The Morning Watch, drawing on events in his life about six years after the the basis of A Death in The Family--blindsiding me like some lost link between Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist: that kind of deep focus on inner and outer life, surefooted in the murk---but Rufus-now-Richard, and maybe 12, is deep in the Tennessee countryside, even deeper in an "Anglo-Catholic" boys school, to use the apt term of the LoA chronologist: it's that American part of the Episcopal Church that refers to itself as Anglican (or did when I first encountered it in college--not like the Renaissance Faire-hosting, petite sophisticate church back home, a few yards from my Southern Baptist massiveness!), aspiring to adhere to that part of the Church of England closest to Mother Church (at least as one of my fellow American students later claimed, when I asked him wtf)--outliving Henry the Eighth, after all, so why not.
So why not just be straight-up Catholic? One reason might have to do with one of the reasons Richard's mother, who lives on campus, won't let him come see her very often: she (or at least James Rufus Agee's real-life mother) has taken up with one of the priests, which is okay because they're *Anglo* Catholic and she's a widow---maybe thinking her son would be upset to see her with someone new and also judge her, and also he is no doubt a handful who needs a whole institution of male guidance---as Rufus, he even sneaked out the backdoor to go meet up with the school bullies (who increasingly were having problems figuring out what more to do with him really don't know what because he loves the attention), and now he could tell 'em, "My Daddy's dead," and watch! What! Happens!)
At this point, 12 or so, he's well aware of his performative core, and layers of self-awareness become more grandiose whips of self-flagellation, bad acid halls of mirrors in the ego that will not die--because he's JAMES FUCKING AGEE, Southern Anglo-Catholic rising)
But also it's a pretty tight novella, which I won't spoil.

george perec - life: a users manual

i’m about 60 pages in. like a mix of Borges and Proust. some moments are laugh out loud funny, but also like 50% of it so far is descriptions of furniture. just got through my first tour of the building and something resembling a plot is vaguely emerging. i read somewhere this was written under some oulipian constraints, anyone know which they are? the writing is fantastic and extremely French

i always forget that ilm doesn’t like any kanye after 808s

wrong thread lol

at least on ilb you won't have to suffer attacks for your kanye-related opinions

The constraints Perec devised for Life A Users Manual are many-layered and complex: it takes twelve or so pages of Bellos’s Perec biography to explain them!

My rough précis: he uses 10x10 grids:

(1) a grid superimposed on a picture of the house; the order of the chapters is based on “the knight’s move” a way for a knight in chess to make its way around a board - or in this case an extended 10x10 chessboard - visiting every square, once only.

(2) 21 grids, with a thing / name / concept in each square. Each row / column was a more or less coherent list of things with a title. By combining and recombining the elements of these lists he had what Bellos calls a “machine” to distribute material around the house and around the main plot (fee free to quibble with there being a main plot) and the 170+ other stories listed at the end of the book. Bellos reckons none of the stories in the book are untouched by this content-generating machine.

Past that, there were various other sets of book wide or chapter-specific rules, puns, references word-games and jokes.

Bellos says Perec didn’t use any of his rules completely consistently, the closest he came was the knight’s move stuff and even there he omits the content for square 66 (there’s speculation about what that means). Perec makes it impossible to trace the shape or nature of the constraints from the final work: once the scaffolding is removed the building has to stand on its own.

Personally I find this stuff interesting in a way that I might find the story of a recording session for a song I love interesting: the act and process of creation is cool, but what I love about the finished work is something else entirely.

I don’t know if the above is helpful or just obscure, I can scan and send the relevant pages if you like.

I’m not much of a consumer of literary biogs but the David Bellos biography “Georges Perec: A Life In Words” referenced above is really good.

I need to reread Life A User's Manual but I've been saying that for decades. I think I read it in my late teens or early 20s. I remember when I was on the protest camp somebody was coming up with books regularly and i think a copy turned up then but it may have been in French so not much use to me. Which is now a decade ago anyway.
I remember it being really good so need to reread that and read a few others of his.

Did get hold of 2 Marlon James books from the library yesterday. A Short History Of Seven Killings and Black Leopard, Red Wolf . NOt started into either yet though. Maybe shouldn't have got both at the same time since they're both pretty thick and I have other things already on the go

Am just finishing the Larry KIrwan book Rocking the Bronx his novel about the Irish punk immigrating illegally to the Bronx. Have found it quite great so will read the memoir Green Suede Shoes which I picked up a few weeks earlier.

That's a good post from Tim.

And also a stimulating thought about how relevant process is or isn't to the experience of the work.

My sense would have been that, in this particular kind of case (formalism, procedural art, or whatever), it is; that thinking about process is a big part of the experience. Tim seems to suggest otherwise.

For me, the central pleasure of LAUM is in the text itself, which I found and find dizzying and coherent (which is quite a combination). I read and loved the book with a vague sense that some kind of process was in place but without any idea of what it was or how it was applied. Only long afterwards did I even begin to understand how Perec structured and used his constraints.

Perec's preface to the novel is all about jigsaws, which is relevant to the "main" story but also a bit of a tease: it feels like a hint that it would be possible to take the contents of the novel and reassemble them into the source materials and constraints: that turns out not to be possible.

As I understand it the question of "scaffolding" is a live one in OuLiPo circles: some writers think it's important to retain and show the working process, others think it's important to remove it. I tend to take the cowardly and somewhat mealy-mouthed position that either's fine if the end product is rewarding on its own terms.

I am with you there, Tim. I find process fascinating, and have been working with intense formal and processual constraints in my own writing for years, but find that I don't want my readers to care too much about it...yet on the other hand, I want to know how books like LAUM, among others, were written. A bit of a contradictory position.

There's a somewhat interesting document from 2009, during a brief resurgence of more conceptual poetics within contemporary poetry. Due to the asshattery of some of its main characters— Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Nada Gordon, etc— it has been batted down and isn't part of the conversation any longer, though as an aesthetics document it holds some interest, I think. Free pdf: https://monoskop.org/images/1/1e/Place_Vanessa_Fitterman_Robert_Notes_on_Conceptualisms_2009.pdf

I look forward to reading that, and I will try to stay away from any asshattery if I possibly can. Thanks!

I said this:

For me, the central pleasure of LAUM is in the text itself, which I found and find dizzying and coherent

and I want to expand on it because it's not-very-meaningful personal shorthand. The other week I went to see some of Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms at the Tate Modern: they're small spaces which (through carefully positioning of lights and reflective surfaces) seem to go on forever. In some you seem to be there everywhere you look, over and over and in others you seem to disappear completely into the infinity. My brain always feels on the edge of making sense of these impossible landscapes but never quite does.

That's the best comparison I can think of for LAUM: the stories seem to go on forever, to reflect and affect each other, it feels like everything is probably there if I look closely enough but I know it's impossible to look closely enough or hold enough of it in my head. I know that's an effect, generated by careful layering of stories and references, and I love it. Knowing there's a process and structure behind it makes the whole thing even more tantalising!

On top of which many of the stories hit me emotionally too.

The asshattery mostly has to do with some works created by these people that are racist. Place had a project where she tweeted out sentences from "Gone With The Wind" and the profile picture was a Mammy caricature, to draw attention to the racist elements of the most beloved novel in the US. Goldsmith read parts of Michael Brown's autopsy report, rearranged and "remixed," at a conference at Brown University. Basically doing poorly thought-out conceptual takes on Objectivist material, like idiots mimicking Reznikoff. Goldsmith is an execrable human, Place is (I think) rather brilliant but doesn't seem to have much emotional intelligence. Fitterman is a smart dude, and he co-wrote that PDF with Place.

I finished The True Deceiver last night. It's brilliant, but in a low key way. The story is spare and tersely told, but I found that so much was packed into each short chapter that I would frequently stop reading and lay the book down so that I could absorb what I'd just read and tease out what had happened between the lines. More so than any book I've recently read this short novel was beautifully constructed in every detail and each small incident bores in like another twist of an augur. A very fine book!

I finished "Leave the World Behind" by Rumaan Alam. Structurally, it is basically a horror novel. Emotionally, it proceeds from a gently comic calm to increasing cringe and low-level anxiety through to dread and eventually to a few moments of genuine horror. The setting is quite mundane for a contemporary novel, NYC creative-class types vacationing on Eastern Long Island, not the Hamptons, which they can't afford, but somewhere in that general direction. The initial family dynamics are also mundane, and one hopes this implies a payoff which is going to be as disturbing and weird as the setup is normal. The first major plot twist is clever, deftly skewering the latent awkwardness behind new social arrangements enabled by AirBnb and the sharing economy. Things get progressively weirder, but Alam pulls some punches, in my view, by keeping the real weird stuff offstage and only obliquely hinting at it in kind of arch H.P. Lovecraft fashion, implying that to fully reveal it would likely drive the reader to madness. So some good ideas, but it seems like the book kind of ends when it should be just getting going.

John le Carre, Little Drummer Girl - politically it holds up surprisingly well, I think? Socially not so much.

Rachel Cusk, Second Place - only a quarter through so far and not enjoying it as much as the Outline trilogy, but there's still a lot to enjoy in her writing.

Meghan O'G1eblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor & the Search for Meaning - only googleproofing because she's a friend, but it's really amazingly written. Talks about AI & consciousness, the pervasiveness of technological metaphors to describe the human brain, etc. Really approachable and personal given the subject matter.

Politically it holds up surprisingly well, I think? Socially not so much. How do you mean? Haven't seen this distinction (re anything) before.

Although some politically astute people aren't so good socially, come to think of it.

You mean the characterizations are clunky, politics aside?

thx Tim!

Sorry that was poorly stated, I just mean that the Israel/Palestine stuff is handled well and holds up, but that a lot of the male/female relationships can be cringey at times.

(also is this le Carre's horniest novel? I've only read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and a couple of the Smiley ones)

The Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman
American gay political history starting from the 1950s. The early stuff was the most interesting to me as I knew nothing about it. Also new to me was the lesbian separatist movement. One of the main themes of the book is the mainstreamers vs. the radicals and it's pretty evenhanded, pointing out times where the radicals triggered reactionary responses and also times where they were pointlessly shut out by mainstreamers. There were also conflicts between male gays and female gays and neither side comes across well, having petty conflicts and a general apathy between them.

currently reading the short novel The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory, a murder mystery about a boyband of human-animal hybrids.

xpost Yeah, that's what I thought you meant, Jordan (and the way I come closest to actually remembering it), but wasn't quite sure.
Just finished Emma Cline's The Girls, and will re-read parts, but certainly plausibly (as far as this simple male mind can grok) develops/runs with what Lena Dunham's blurb references as "the intricacies of girlhood," though here maybe a little too tied in with a schematic ov Thee Manson Family--notably simplified---and I wonder if third person would bring in the other girls' mynds more; here, narrator Evie keeps zooming on her beloved Suzanne, eventual point person in murders, and always principal handmaiden to scuzzy Love God Russell--but the group dynamic is vivid enough, unpretentiously shaded as much-examined crucial events can be, many years later.
A framing b-plot, set in the present, extends the early and late teen and older male dynamic past cultimess per se, further emphasizing (along with 14-year-old Evie's earlier and ongoing experiences among normies, when she's away from the ranch)how gender passports get stamped etc. on different situations---also there's a reference to Russell learning lot from his early public service with "a religious group in Ukiah," re needy, vulnerable women of various ages and backgrounds, not just teen runaways (making me think of Ted Bundy, psych major, volunteering for the help line at the crisis center) Also how other males of various ages and backgrounds take advantage, or fumble it, in some cases, but take a poke at it.
Mainly it's about girls, and the plot could be another plot, many others---if any of several subplots and brief scenes here became dominant----which, although this storyline stays on course, seems an implicit point, or theme, brushing by.

Excited to start By Night in Chile on vacation.

I'm currently reading a Penguins Classics book with the excruciatingly long title+subtitle of: Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. It is comprised of Parts I, II, & III plus 4 Appendices. Part I is a lengthy narrative by Ibn Fadlan into the southern Urals. Part II is an account by Abu Hamid of his adventurous travels east of the Caspian. Part III contains 46 individual snippets from 20 different authors.

What makes it all interesting is that all these bits and bobs are among the few somewhat reliable accounts of huge swathes of Central Asia from the ninth century to the thirteenth century. The Khazars get big play in them so far.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I wasn't expecting a sort of picaresque, usually my least favourite kind of novel but this is so compellingly nightmarish - and lyrically written - that it put me in mind of the third policeman, though it's far more realist in intent.

Started reading Marlon James A Short HIstory of Seven Killings.
It's tied in with the deaths of several people around Bob marley in an attempted assassination of him. I think so far it has people trying to tell you who they were . NOt read very far into it but so far have read a couple of different people trying to explain perspectives.
Seems to be trying to keep people in their natural idioms.
Have seen this heavily recccommended and seen a webinar with teh writer so hoping I can get heavily into this, do have several things on th ego at the moment and probably shouldn't have grabbed his Black Leopard, Red Wolf from the library at the same time or vice versa. But had seen the local library has the 2 of them on their website and then this vanished from there. Not sure what the story with that is. BUt had to ask librarian if they did actually have this listed so took both

ANgela Saini Inferior
I read this at Xmas when I was drinking quite a bit so thought I'd give it a cleaner reading. Think it's pretty good. It's Saini's book on Gender imbalance and unpacking why science has tried to support the assymetry, what agendas were involved etc.
I enjoy Saini, I need to read her first book Geek Nation about science practise in India

The Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman

good stuff

I finish John le Carré: THE PIGEON TUNNEL: STORIES FROM MY LIFE.

I admire JLC's ability to inject modesty and humour all the time. He almost literally never lets conceit, grandeur, acclaim get the better of him; always sees it sidelong and brings himself down to earth.

His life was more dramatic, interesting, packed with extraordinary encounters than that of most modern writers. He wrote an extraordinary number of novels. I should read more of them.

His father was a scary conman, like a psychopath, judging by Le Carre's Fresh Air interview: so bad it's funny in some instances and there's laughter when there has to be---worth looking for in the FA archives.

Perfect spy is semiautobiographical on the topic of his father IIUC.

I’m reading Pigeon Tunnel right now, based on a recent ILB rec (yours?). I find the modesty veers to humblebraggery but there’s no doubt that it’s an extraordinarily juicy and well-composed book - I prefer it to the novels so far.

I just finished Wizard of Earthsea, which was astonishing. I’ve always avoided Le Guin, found her austere and difficult — and it turns out she is, except that’s what makes her so good.

Hope you won't be stopping there.

Chuck Tatum: I thought about your statement on JLC and I think that we might be in some degree of agreement.

I might put it this way: Only someone with so much to be proud about as JLC would be so repeatedly and noticeably humble.

Finished Rodefer's 'Mon Canard,' read Bruce Andrews' 'Tizzy Boost,' Thomas Meyer's 'The Umbrella of Aesculapius,' Ben Roylance's 'The Chymical Wedding of Benjamin Roylance,' and Ken Irby's 'Antiphonal and Fall to Fall.'

Now I'm toggling between the massive Gerald Burns book, 'Shorter Poems,' and my friend SLUTO's non-fictional travel narrative that borrows the form of a crew-change. Both pretty neat and interesting.

I finished Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, but it became something of a slog in Part III, where the snippets from many hands repeated many of the same facts, often in the same words, because the snippets was derived from a later epitome, compiled directly from earlier sources with slavish fidelity. The purpose of all the repetition in this book was clearly based on the idea that centuries of scribal errors in reproducing the original text could be retrieved by scholars, by overlaying many examples that relied on the same textual sources. But, tbrr, scholars of these texts shouldn't be operating from a Penguins Classics translation.

Only recommended for those who are very curious about the Khazars, Rus and various Turkic tribes around 950 AD.

Last night I started The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington. As I begin it, it reads rather like a sophisticated version of the sort of shaggy dog tale a parent might make up on the fly as a serial bedtime story for their kid. Or maybe like a less sophisticated Lewis Carrol.

Anyway, so far there's enough invention and interest to carry me along, based almost entirely on its childlike tone and quirky atmosphere. I hope eventually there is more to it than that.

read vladimir sorokin's ICE TRILOGY, which was occasionally intriguing or at least stylistically impressive, but mostly absurd and repetitive

i mean the word 'heart' is used 1200 times and the phrase 'meat machines' almost 500

seems like more a feat for the (late) translator than the author. or critics who can be all like 'here is the true russian history of the 20th century' (it isn't)

I'm selective with what fiction I listen to on audiobook but I really enjoyed Sian Phillips' reading of The Hearing Trumpet.

Yeats in 1885-6. Theosophy, hermetic societies, mystics, magic. Complete nonsense. R.F. Foster continues to write superbly. I've probably never read a better historian.

sometimes it's better not to know how foolish/juvenile/egotistical/abusive an artist is/was. it's like watching shakespeare pick his nose, examine the product and casually eat it.

well i thought hamnet was good actually

hamnet was fiction

jfc

lol

jfc

mostly fiction, too

^^^^ all of this just made my afternoon lol

The two McCullers novels I hadn't read 'til a few weeks ago:

Reflections In A Glass Eyewas the follow-up to The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and not as well received, at least at the time. Same voice, some of the same themes/undercurrents, but otherwise can see why it was a jolt, as if The Professor's House arrived just after Cather's early crowdpleasers---not a peak like as TPH--there are a few bum notes, and a few declivities---but overall, it's an eerie, elegant, psychological thriller, almost a novella--small cast, short period of time, tucked away on a small-time-seeming US Army base, with not even a flicker of war over the horizon, even though published in 1941: so more striking differences from big, rowdy, somewhat misleadingly-titled, rollin' with the Great Depression rounds of THIALH/
Delving scenes, as always w McCullers, here sometimes seeming so done that they're set pieces, reminding me of Warhol's "My portraits are my still lifes." 'til all the snapshots are cards on the table, uh-oh---making me think of Dream of The Red Chamber.
LoA chronology for The Complete Novels incl. a call from a purported Klan member, maybe because the flamboyant Filipino houseboy is much more responsive and responsible to his (also observant) invalid mistress than her feckless white officer husband, certainly more to the point than any of his vastly amused white officers-and-ladies betters (as a servant, of course, he'd better be).
Race in the reader's face 20 years later, in her last novel, Clock Without Hands, written under great duress, as her health got even worse, but the youthfulness of some characters is very fresh, as convincing as the gradual, relentless decline of their elders.
Sweet clarity, no need for much charity: her steady gaze seems just, and she knows how obliviously people can damage themselves and each other (not that all of her characters are like that in the stories, but maybe they all could be, given enough pages, enough living).

Reflections In A Golden Eye, duh, sorry! Although I like "Glass" better, but/and it's maybe a little too wiseass for her, more Algren or Flannery O'Connor.

I think I still have CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS on the shelf from 15 years ago - I should get around to that.

LONELY HUNTER, I found a devastating portrait of loss and despair.

Yes, but there's also a lot of vitality, incl. the power and pleasure of storytelling, pushing against that, and making its way through the years, at least for a while, and that's life (although I don't think that her characters having sex ever leads in a good direction)(but it's more about the power of their drives, whether they even ever get laid or not)

power and where it takes them

took a break from Life: A User's Manual to read 'the sluts' by dennis cooper, which i picked up because table is the table told me that a side-plot in 'darryl' by jackie ess (which i read last month and loved) referenced. i read it in one sitting (on a plane-ride) and HOLY SHIT. such an intense experience. it's basically a horny version of seven samurai, written through a sequence of reviews left on a gay escort review website in the early 2000s. the whole structure of it, where all the information is delivered by unreliable narrators--and he plays with the anonymity so that at some points you e.g. suspect that one person is assuming multiple identities--ahhhh it was so genius. it reminded me of that old ilx thread where a bunch of people got catfished. it's NOT for the faint of heart (i consider myself to have a pretty strong stomach and i was squirming hard in some sections) but imho has a great dark comic sensibility. got 'closer' out of the library, i kinda don't think anything can live up to this but man

In a Lonely Place and a volume of John Berryman's criticism; in the latter, he proves himself a more incisive writer of prose than of increasingly nattering poems.

Lonely Place is terrific. Unfortunately I read it assuming the plot would at some point turn into the plot of the movie. Unreliable narrator meet unreliable reader.

I have just over 100pp to read of Foster's 500pp+ WBY volume 1.

I love this book, though reading it is also a great labour. It must be the greatest biography I have ever read.

It is full of marvellous facts and details, like the endnote on p.555:

Bernard Shaw, in his diary, after his first meeting with Yeats in 1888:
'An Irishman called Yeats talked about socialism a great deal'.

Finally finished Gerald Burns 'Shorter Poems,' which was wonderful but felt a little like a slog toward the end because his style— long lines and a sort of rambling-yet-crystalline erudition— is so singular that it can be overwhelming. In any case, glad I read it.

In the meantime, I'm in the first few chapters of Colin Woodard's 'The Lobster Coast,' which is about the history of coastal Maine. Very interesting popular history book that makes me want to pack up and move there even more than I already do, tbh.

And speaking of Dennis Cooper, his newest book arrived the other day, and so I began that this morning— already can tell it is one of his most vulnerable and personal books. Will probably run through it as I usually do, his prose is so good.

been a while since i've posted. work innit. so a rapid book update:

wrote a long thing all been deleted. no rapid book update.

Today I noticed that the last book I finished, "Leave the World Behind", is being made into a Netflix movie starring Julia Roberts. Now I'm reading the Booker-prize winner "The Sellout" by Paul Beatty, which it's probably safe to say is a lot less conducive to the made-for-Netflix movie treatment.

I finished The Hearing Trumpet. The first two thirds were somewhat witty and amusing, as those qualities were prominent in the narrator's character. This changed gradually. As the story became more and more captured by pagan mythology and symbolism and the events became more cataclysmic the narrator's sense of humor faded away and the book became more serious. Which was a pity, because I couldn't find much value in sorting through the jumble of demons, pagan goddesses, werewolves, apocalyptic end times and whatnot. These held no reality for me and no matter how frantically they piled up it was impossible to care much about them.

I also read The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, Béla Zombory-Moldován. A 29 year old Hungarian artist is called into the army and hastily thrown into the front line in the opening days of WWI, where he is trapped for a full day in the open under a continuous artillery bombardment, wounded, evacuated and tries to recover from massive traumatic shock. It was written much later in his life, but the level of recalled detail shows how deeply it burned into his memory. The story is not very new, but his telling makes it so personal and individual that it becomes new again.

Now I am re-reading Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford. It is an astonishing book with an artless veneer. She has an unerring talent for shaping an entertaining anecdote with a barbed point just under the surface and more material to work with than any fifty ordinary humans could generate in a lifetime. It's a hell of a book.

I should read Hons and Rebels again. Aimless you and I have been chasing each other in our reading lately - I also just finished The Hearing Trumpet last week and checked out The Burning of the World yesterday but haven’t started it yet. Also I share your admiration for The True Deceiver.

In the meantime I read David Mitchell’s recent Utopia Avenue, I wrote a bit on the Mitchell thread but basically it kinda sucked.

Finished the new Dennis Cooper book, "I Wished."

Still reading the book about Maine, usually before sleep, but I think today I'm going to try to tackle some chapbooks I've had piling up.

Now in the homestretch of Afterparties, the new debut book by Anthony Veasna So, b. 1992, d. Dec. 2020: 258 pages of short stories, so far hitting me like My Brilliant Friend and few other things I can think of: rowdy and resplendent and tragicomic and endlessly resourceful, with the excitement of language cruising ghosty dusty Cali "Cambo" life and lives: even-especially when you think you know the kind of thing that will happen and not happen around the next corner, here are more drive-by insights---they seem that right, so far from my own experiences and yet not: pain and pleasure and success and failure as art pop narcotic that leaves you with whatever keys you wake up with this time.
May try to say something more analytical later, but so far it's hard to believe he already did all this, and is already gone.

― dow, Friday, August 27, 2021 3:22 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I picked this up this week and read the first two stories, “three women of chuck’s donuts” and “superking son scores again”, both of which had previously been published but I hadn’t read before. his work is receiving a lot of positive press and I intuited from a few reviewers a sort of debt to diaz, which I think he tries pretty admirably to justify, though neither story so far has resonated with me like some of the best stuff in drown, an admittedly high standard for this reader. looking forward to diving in further this weekend and curious to read the experiences of others

We'll need an new thread in a few days. Equinox is a-coming.

"Superking..." seemed a little amiable or something compared to "Three Women..." and then everything in there---yet it's the one that received the Joyce Carol Oates Award, h'mmm. Will have to check Drown again (which I enjoyed, though it was upstaged in my memory, in a bad way by the novel and some subsequent stories/excerpts from the apparently abandoned second novel), but So's chronicles seemed convincingly drawn from experience, incl. close and unavoidable observation, also extrapolation---at one point, he even writes from the viewpoint of a straight boy with a girlfriend, although--well, you'll see).

Reporting back from holiday reading:

Infinitely Full Of Hope, Tom Whyman - Left twitter dude and philosopher (great case of nominative determinism) writes a memoir about becoming a father that is also a philosophical treatise on how hope can be possible in our current historic moment. Lad has a lot more time for Adorno than I do.

Cherokee, Jean Echenoz - I seem to end up reading a lot of French crime fiction, partially because I'm drawn to it and partially because, I think, French acquaintances figure it's easier for me to digest as a non-native speaker. But it's really not! Crime fiction relies on keeping constant attention to details, I think I could actually get a smoother ride from literary fiction even if I needed to look up words more often. Which is all to say that I'm not entirely sure I got the resolution of this comic thriller, though it was certainly an enjoyable ride, grimy and full of strange digressions.

Variations, Juliet Jacques - Another Left Twitter star with a series of short stories painting a portrait of the history of transness in the UK. This allows her to sidestep issues of trans as a historical category, taking in characters who wouldn't have identified as such. The stories are all framed as historical documents, too - letters, oral histories, newspaper clippings, etc. which is the kind of formal trickery I love. Really enjoyed this a lot.

btw I’m now about halfway through afterparties and am now completely bought in, great stuff

the patricia lockwood novel is bad, just a pile of tweets sloshed with autofictional pathos sauce, no thanks

Finished the new Dennis Cooper (devastating), had a busy weekend so not as much reading as I would have liked but spent some time with my book about the Maine coast and also nearly finished a do-si-do chapbook by my friends Daniel and Jenn.

I today finished James Joyce: CRITICAL, POLITICAL & OCCASIONAL WRITINGS ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford, 2000).

It's an outstanding, almost comprehensive collection. (My doubt: shouldn't JJ's original 'Portrait' essay of 1904 be here? Or maybe not.)

The Introduction is very shrewd, especially re how JJ was not as unique as he would want us to think, and how we should return to eg DANA magazine c.1903 if we're interested in this stuff. It's less good in a tangential section on JJ's Aesthetics. Those are written in an irritating, superior, pedantic, repetitive, stultifying style that I think is suppose to be an example of how well Thomistic Catholics think.

The extent of JJ's political knowledge (eg of England, let alone Ireland), in many of these pieces, is very notable and would surprise some people.

I followed up by starting the Foreword and Introduction to J.C.C. Mays' edition of James Joyce: POEMS AND EXILES (1992).

i read minor feelings by cathy park hong which i thought was great, but i'm white btw. apparently they're adapting it as a tv series, which seems bananas. table: do serious poetry people like her?

i also read hail mary by andy weir (who did the martian). it was well-executed trash.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

The Sorrows of Young Werther. Christ what an asshole.

I started watching the film by Max ophuls but the sound was atrocious. So I gave up , did seem a tad sanctimonious.

The Mandarins Simone De Beauvoir
Her novel loosely based on the intellectual circle in paris in the immediate wake of WWII and over teh next 5 years. She did claim it was not a roam a clef at one point . But interesting anyway.
Have had this kicking around for way too long drifting around my front room so glad to be getting into it.

Angela Saini INferior
reread this book on science and Gender imbalance. Enjoyed and was drinking way less than when i first read it last Xmas .
Looking forward to her book on the patriarchy whenever that lands.

How To Rig an Election Nic Cheeseman, Brian Klaas
book on political intrigue I picked up a couple of months ago. Looks interesting.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

This sounds like the Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. Great book.

The Sorrows of Young Werther. Christ what an asshole.

Agreed, really didn't enjoy reading this dude's livejournal.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

This sounds like the Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. Great book.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, September 22, 2021 5:52 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was it. Many thanks.

i read minor feelings by cathy park hong which i thought was great, but i'm white btw. apparently they're adapting it as a tv series, which seems bananas. table: do serious poetry people like her?

Many of my Asian poet friends (and Asian non-poet friends, tbh) take serious issue with some of Minor Feelings. Since I'm not Asian, I don't really feel comfortable explaining those issues, but let's just say that they're present.

As far as her own poetry is concerned, her book Dance Dance Revolution is interesting to me, but much of her poetry is what poets call "workshop-core"— that is, the poems seem written for a specific audience to teach specific types of innovative writing techniques. In that way, they're valuable, but qua books of poems, they're kind of "meh."

She also hasn't put out a book of poems in nearly a decade. Before Minor Feelings came out, she was probably most well-known in poetry circles for this absolutely damning takedown of the white supremacist gatekeepers of the avant-garde circa 2013-2014: https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde

ty

Really, really enjoying this (my first Menard) but realizing that given my pace and its size, a three week library loan isn't gonna be enough to finish it.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374722913

I guess I've aged into a 10-15 pages per day reader for stuff like this. It's just so rich, like a dark chocolate cake.

I see Menand in the link, but was primed to expect ... a vast new work by Pierre Menard.

Sorry about that

Ha, was hoping for the same thing!

Like a new album by one of these guys.

Here Comes Everybody James Fearnley
Memoir by Pogues and Nipple Erectors member. Hope i didn't already have this,k definitely don't remember having read it if I did. I think i8t was around in various places at cut price a few years ago. Like in the 2 for £5 in FOPP and i think in HMV .
Finding it quite compelling at the moment, he's been brought into the Nipple Erectors on guitar then been fired by the bassist when he's asked if he can subsitute for her on a recording opportunity offered by Paul Weller when she's too heavily pregnant to play bass. He's apparently still involved with Shane Macgowan who he's hung out with during his Nips tenure cos Shane's trying to talk him into wearng Gladiator gear on a project he's talking about putting together. From which it appears the Pogues may have been suggested thanks to connections to music being talked about Irish music resembling Arabic which is like Aegean which would have been the music in the Roman Project thingy, or so it would appear.
Enjoying it anyway.
& missed seeing the Pogues despite having heard of their existence pretty early on and meaning to go and see them in Hope & Anchor etc days & buying records off Shane when he worked in that record shop behind Virgin.

I've been distracted by the Muhammad Ali documentary lately, but I finished re-reading Hons and Rebels last night. Very satisfying book.

NB: The equinox arrived. Summer has fleeted. This thread may be put to bed now and a new edition commenced. I'll think about it later today, but please feel free to forestall me by starting one yourself. I'd thank you for it.

Et, voila: Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

Thank you.

the mezzanine by nicholson baker - first read 20 years ago. has not aged well but very good at what it does.

the kingdoms by natasha pulley - alt history (what if napoleon had won). dreadful.

the new sally rooney - not as good as the other two. much less interested in reading her opinions in epistolary than teenage soap opera.

amazon unbound - overly sympathetic look at bezos/amazon since ~2010 (there's a part 1 from 90s-2010, but i haven't read it). despite being overly sympathetic, it's crazy how bad they are for the world when you see it laid out. amoral criminality notwithstanding, some interesting business operations stuff (i work in tech).

a thousand ships by natalie haynes - i read madeline miller last year and this is follow-up from that. enjoyed it!

stubborn archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler - short debut from young brazilian british writer set in london/sao paolo. nothing really happens and i liked it a lot.

looking glass war - minor le carre. not his best obviously. very straightforward plot. i thought i'd like that, because i find some of his plots borderline incomprehensible. it turns out i like being baffled, and this one in particular felt very slight.

whoops lock thread, will repost on the other one.