Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

Somebody had to do it

The previous thread: Bonfires In The Sky: What Are You Reading, Winter 2021-22?

in the early stages of malory's le morte darthur (winchester ms) & just starting to get the hang of the 'and', 'but', 'or' usage.

Did we poll the names in Against the Day? This might have the most Pynchonesque names of any of his books: Scarsdale Vibe (lol), Chevrolet Macadoo, Roswell Bounce, Randolph St. Cosmo, etc. etc. etc.

James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice
Jeffrey Frank - The Trials of Harry S. Truman

John Cheever - Collected Stories
James Shapiro - 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

Beginning Theory Peter Fay
INtroduction to literary and cultural theory I grabbed from a charity shop a few weeks ago. Seems pretty fascinating.
I'm assuming this is a text book for a course but I'm finding it rewarding on its own.

Walter Rodney The Russian Revolution
Rodney's notes for a course he taught in Tanzania reworked as a book and released posthumously by Verso books.
I'm enjoying this too. May prompt me to read further into the history and Marx.

Beyond the Pale Vron Ware
THis seemed to be less about racism within feminism than about feminists fighting racism .
NOt sure if any contrasting light has been shown on the subjects of these studies since . This is from 1990 and probably prompted further research.
INteresting but i think I need to go back over bits of it.

actually Peter barry not fay. getting distracted by toothache right now

Got a new title from teh library yesterday
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative by Thomas King.

Which is another look at the idea of the Indian in the North American consciousness. I was thinking that it was about narrative in general which is why i wanted to read it. But seems to explore some ideas further investigated in the later The Inconvenient Indian.
Interesting read anyway. I think I need to read some of the writer's novels if I get the chance.

It was interesting to come across some ideas that touched on things i had been thinking about crop up in the Rodney Russian Revolution and the Barry Beginning Theory the day after I'd been thinking/talking about them. Rodney talks about the impossibility of directly mapping Marx to the Russian situation where serfs still exist and Lenin had to heavily rework what had been written to show how they could be directly applied. Like more of an interpretation of what Marx had written to fit the actual circumstances rather than rewriting Marx and passing it off as the original if that was misleading.
& I came across Structuralism being discussed in Barry as well as the work of de Saussure who I'd found interesting in the early 00ies.
Finding this Barry to be a good bog book though may mean it takes a lot longer to read.

Just started "The Farthest Shore," enjoying it so far, seems like a more conventional adventure story but in a good way

xp

The Truth About Stories is fantastic. King is awesome in general, both as a writer and a human being (when I met him a few years back he was very happy to look at pictures of my dogs), though some of his more recent fiction that I've read hasn't been terribly strong. Truth and Bright Water (1999) is my favorite of his novels that I've read (when I talked to him I told him that Soldier, from that novel, was my favorite dog character in all of literature, which was how we got onto the aforementioned topic), but if I were to point someone towards just one thing that he's written, it would be his short story "Joe the Painter and the Deer Island Massacre" (in the collection One Good Story, That One) which is unquestionably one of my very favorite short stories of all time.

I've started "Gravity's Rainbow". See you next year.

I recently finished The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen. I remember reading praise of his earlier doorstop of a novel Witz when it came out, but this seems like a more digestible introduction to his work. My main quibble is that for a comic novel it's only occasionally funny. The Netanyahus themselves are interesting characters, and the book comes alive when they show up, but the Blum family never really came to life for me, and the opening subplot seems kind of a rote depiction of well-worn themes of assimilation. Now I'm reading Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino, an author who himself had a controversial real-life role in 20th century history, as a minister in the Vichy French government.

Reading parts of Adam Roberts, THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION

- from 2005. An outstanding, incredibly capacious book. But does his central distinction between Catholic and Protestant worldviews, the latter generating SF, hold up? Maybe, but the crux at the start of it - that Christians are troubled by whether there was a Christ on other planets than our own - doesn't seem to apply differently to Catholics and Protestants, meaning that the whole theory seems flawed from the outset.

The book is clearly written, though, and contains an amazing amount of learning and reading.

the big picture - ben fritz

journalist who covers hollywood for the wsj writes a history of the last 30 years of cinema, focusing on the question "how did we end up in a state where every movie is spiderman?". the primary source are leaked emails from the sony hack. very juicy and fun, but also a very fascinating peek into the business side of the movies

development economics in action: a study of economic policies in ghana (2nd ed) - tony killick

analysis of the economic policies of kwame nkrumah, first prime minister of ghana who spearheaded post-colonial african socialism. nkrumah attempted a "big push" policy of state-led development, similar to south korea or taiwan. but unlike those countries it was not successful in bringing about sustained prosperity. this book goes into the weeds in trying to explain why. a popular strain of contemporary economic development focuses on factors like political institutions, resource endowments, history, and culture for explaining the wealth of nations, and sees policy choices as epiphenomena downstream of these "deep" forces. this book from 1978 takes the unfashionable view in ascribing significant agency to nkrumah and considers his policies in contrast to counterfactual policies that he could have pursued. very strong so far

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress
Phil Stamper, Golden Boys

I’m stuck at around 2/3 of the way through Breasts and Eggs so I’m diverting around some short story collections atm. I’ll finish it and review it though.

Show Them A Good Time - Nicole Flattery

These stories - eight in all, dark and complex, were easy to read but not so easy to grasp. Is that a compliment? Maybe. I liked this collection very much though. Like me, Flattery is from the Irish midlands and the landscapes she draws on in some of the stories - flat land, dead light, still suffocating air - are familiar to me, as is the mood of depression saturating everything. There’s a lot of dark humour in this collection, almost always unsettling, like hearing someone laugh behind you on a dark path. Her prose is precise in execution, with short sharp sentences, but the stories themselves are almost the opposite. They are woven in almost dreamlike ways. The title story, Show Them A Good Time, is about an almost-revealed service station that seems like purgatory and the atmosphere is very much like that of a nightmare you experience on the edge of waking up. I read it once but I want to read it again.

The main characters in these stories are all women - varying ages and backgrounds. Sometimes they are brutal, sometimes they are adrift, but they are always strangely compelling. Track, I thought, was very interesting, about a directionless woman in a relationship with a famous comedian. There are nightmarish details sprinkled casually throughout the stories, the horror of modern life is mundane and fades with time except to those who experience it directly. “The missing women of the midlands,” the 13 year old’s miscarriage, the slipping ladder - these are all details that haunted the corners of their various stories and hooked into me. She has a very strong sense of who she is and where she’s from and it’s a real pleasure to read that in a young woman’s work.

I would need to read this again, I think, but overall I enjoyed it. It’s not for everyone, but then most things aren’t.

Looks like it is for me, thanks!

You don’t live over here, do you? I’d lend it to you if you came to an ILB FAP.

I'll look around over here, thanks for offer.

Other than some re-reads, there was a big book/writing conference in town this past weekend and I was given or traded for a bunch of books...I think I'm going to ignore the new stuff on the stack, tho, and read Dodie Bellamy's "When The Sick Rule the World" next. Just in a Dodie mood.

Still on my way through THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS, which has now talked about postboxes.

Like so many fine critics, Geoffrey Fletcher has a basic structure of nostalgia, attachment to things from the past, disdain for new ones, though this isn't universal in his or anyone's work. I wonder about this structure, how far it simply reproduces itself every generation, so that the people who loved old music halls (and hated brutalist tower blocks) in 1960 are the people who love ... old brutalist tower blocks (and hate colourful 2000s buildings) now? Or is there something more complex to be discerned?

"are the people"

- meaning: are directly analogous to the people

Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi - Told from the perspectives of various mythological spirits within a young woman, born in Nigeria but (at this part of the book) studying in the US. So both a coming of age story and something darker (the spirits are not entirely benevolent). Good stuff.

I recently finished The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen. I remember reading praise of his earlier doorstop of a novel Witz when it came out, but this seems like a more digestible introduction to his work. My main quibble is that for a comic novel it's only occasionally funny. The Netanyahus themselves are interesting characters, and the book comes alive when they show up, but the Blum family never really came to life for me, and the opening subplot seems kind of a rote depiction of well-worn themes of assimilation. Now I'm reading Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino, an author who himself had a controversial real-life role in 20th century history, as a minister in the Vichy French government.

― o. nate

Thanks. I put the book down at the bookstore last week.

Halfway through Herodotus and Xerxes hasn't even put i his debut appearance.

I finished THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS. Rather aimless by the end, a table-talk manner. Sometimes the personal fancies fly a long way, as in an extraordinary fantasy about what he would like his office and secretary to look like (p.77).

The emphasis that 'London was good, now it's going to the dogs and you should see it before it's gone' is plain. As I said, what I wonder about is how far this is a recurring attitude that almost never goes away. So eg: the London that Iain Sinclair is brusquely sentimental about is a London *after* Fletcher's, isn't it? And there are people now who are aghast when concrete buildings are pulled down, which Fletcher evidently would have abhorred in the first place.

But is that just one cycle, or was there a similar turnover of valuations, say 150 years earlier? Did people in 1840 bemoan the loss of 1790s London?

And does Fletcher, despite all this, have a point -- is it possible that much that he sees disappearing really *is* good and shouldn't have been replaced?

As I've tried to imply, you can repeat the whole cycle for other art forms to an extent. Except that buildings disappear in a particular way that other art doesn't.

I think nostalgia for a bygone age/lost youth has always been a thing but perhaps the turnover in buildings and cultures disappearing accelerated in the 20th century? This is received wisdom on my part, and as such probably wrong.

> Did people in 1840 bemoan the loss of 1790s London?

have you read the londony bits of Sketches By Boz? that's 1836

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sketches_by_Boz
specifically the "Scenes" section

and some of Selected Journalism details night time walks with police, and visits to hospitals and prisons.

from here for the next 4 or 5 chapters https://www.gutenberg.org/files/872/872-h/872-h.htm#page406

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L4aR-Kr3xs

One other element, an extra cog in the wheels if not spanner in the works, in this system is: the nostalgic person very often expresses approval of a few new things, in a way that surprises you - and is perhaps supposed to; a gimmick.

David Thomson saying Bruce Willis was one of the greatest actors ever (I paraphrase) would be an example. Several other such instances across DT's late career.

Jonathan Meades declaring that he liked a new hip café (if not a PPI Blair-era hospital) would be too, if it happened.

Etc.

in the last thread gyac was kind enough to give me an idea of what Again Rachel was like. I have finally got round to starting it and am about 100 pages in and my god I think I could quite happily read 1000 pages of the Walsh sisters plus mother chatting shit to each other, organising parties and dissecting each others lives. I have no idea if the family scenes are realistic though they seem that way to me. I'm an only child and I find the way she writes the family fascinating equal parts seductive and terrifying and so so alien to anything I have ever experienced.

I am from an Irish family and have several sisters and it is absolutely dead on ime. I’m really happy you’re enjoying it!

Yesterday I took Margery Allingham, THE WHITE COTTAGE MYSTERY (1928), from the library, started reading it at teatime, and finished it before midnight.

I can hardly remember the last time I read a novel in a day, let alone about 6 hours.

It's an English detective story, of Golden Age kind - though half of it is set in France. It managed to keep the solution to the mystery from me till near the end. The author was only about 23 when writing it, and the apprentice element shows a bit in the writing.

I hope to go on to read more detective novels like this. I've started EIGHT DETECTIVES (2020) by Alex Pavesi which is a recent, I think meta-, take on the genre. It's already intricate after 30 pages or so.

Heartbeat of Wounded knee David Treuer
Book on Indians in the Americas in reaction to Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. Treuer talks about Brown leaving it seeming taht the Indian appears to only exist in the past tense which is something Thomas King also addresses. So Treuer looks at the history and current status of the indian population. So far I've just finished the section on the history of the various populations of Indians up to 1890.
I'm finding thsi to be an easy read taht makes me want to look into some further reading on the various groups. Treuer also accentuates teh extent to which these various groups reacted to new developments thanks to European contact, Picking up on various new technologies and relocations caused by them . So their history did not stand still as Western tradition would like things to be seen. Prior to European contact there was already continual change of course. But that doesn't fit well with how the west wanted to use the narrative.
I had this book recommended in a few different places a couple of years back and have had it out for a couple of months. I'm hoping I'm going to get through it before i has to be returned. Just having to deal with teh library system having been resoprted so hoping that the return date i had before that is going to stick. Cos yeah do definitely want to get through this. & jheffrey Ostler's Surviving Genocide which i got for Xmas and haven't started.

Beginning Theory Paul barry
apparently part of a larger series of introductory books this one is on critical theory. I'm finding it pretty fascinating . Wish I could permanently osmose it into my cerebellum or something. GOt some critical processes that I hadn't really thought of. Things like Freudian analysis as a textual tool and stuff.
Anyway really enjoying it so hope i can remember its ins and outs. Also wonder to what extent content from earlier editions gets repalced and what just gets updated.

John Le Carre's last novel Silverview
Edwin Williamson's Borges: A Life

Joan is Okay by Weike Wang
Recommended from pandemic reading: An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good by Helene Tursten
The only other book I have checked out is a book by Thomas Piketty that I've had for a year. I must read it before I return it.

Hi pinefox, since you're getting into detective stories, this is good: Crime Fiction, S/D

Also maybe this, which I'm not as familiar with: british and american crime fiction

Robert Gottlieb's Garbo makes a persuasive case that his love object's most consistently (yet relatively) fathomable artistry was in The Art of The Deal---yes, she would have totally gotten Donald Trump, also Fred, if she bothered to be aware of them (we're told she "favored junk TV," so maybe)--but her deal was: if you played by her rules (or, much more rarely, by yours, maybe, but either way--the rules, baby!), she'd give you something, or let you have it, pick it up, while she was on her way.
You might get a movie, yes, or more likely, a really good still, even without a telephoto lens---known as a "hermit about town" in Hollywood and Manhattan and the Med, especially, she could be found until she couldn't, her choice. (Sure, other people have tried to run the gauntlet of zombies, but you gotta somehow know to pick just the right running buddies and drivers, not like poor Princess Di: more artistry.)
You might, however she treated you, get something to write about, as so many did (Gottlieb's dedicated, never solemn throughline of biography x critical/fanboy study, personal x professional and post-professional phases has no prob citing sources, incl. coming up with some startling quotes from previous bios, memoirs, and press coverage, both features and reviews). You might even get to do some
or all of your best writing ever, as evidenced by A Garbo Reader, the section after the biography proper.
But you might not have to bother with any of that: you might just get some attention, and let somebody else do the work. Like the reporters who started coming around the old neighborhood pretty early, and o hell yes people there remembered the beautiful little girl, often dressed like a boy, greeting them with a smile and an open hand, ready for the coin she would take straight to the show, marching past the candy butcher. Putting on her own shows with other kids--if nothing else, she'd grab her big brother, Sven, as he recalled it: "You are the father." And the middle sib, their sister, Alva---also beautiful, a promising actress, who would die in early adulthood: "You are the mother. And I am your child who has drowned."
Sven said she always had that dark side, enough to seem like the oldest, not the youngest, in the family, which may have had to do with why she was the one who took their slowly dying father around to charity hospitals---he known for his own beauty, and charm, and love of the arts, though he could never afford to go anywhere for fun, even when he could still work. She called it a scarring experience,, because of the way they were treated and the way she saw his suffering, up close and often, when they were alone together. )Long after, she finally managed to persuade her mother, brother, and and his family out of Europe, just before WWII might have made flight impossible, but she kept them on the East Coast, rarely if ever visiting even after she moved there, not 'til the coast was clear of the older generations, and she could be the fun greataunt, albeit with rules, of course.)
The experience with her father, however, may have had something to do with the times she submitted to the rules of older men: usually thought to be gay, but with some kind of furious macho passion for her. The brilliant Swedish director broke her down and built her up, rewarding her with Germany, where she had a more thoughtful following, even got her to work with the gentler GW Pabst, who offered more roles---but Stiller was furious, and hustled her off to Hollywood dammit.
Louie G. Mayer took over as her desert god, casting out the impractical Stiller, though Mayer was increasingly balanced by Thalberg, who guided and was guided by her---"She can do that? Let's see if she can do this, then"--until his sudden death, which may well have had to do with her quitting the biz.
More King ov Garbo Gays: George Schlee, Cecil Beaton. Other noted gay guys, the ones quoted by Gottlieb, couldn't figure it out. Marlene Dietrich, archenemy in her own mind: "She rapes men." Garbo: "Who is Marlene Dietrich?" Boom, drop the mic.
The compulsive skating along the surface of pleasure, the rules of the game between the cobwebs of self-knowledge. rang a bell when mentioned by James Harvey during his A Garbo Reader guided tour of Camille, re the relationship of the courtesan and her sugar daddy---she even acts the pet daughter to him at times, but they also, increasingly, have a sour running joke about each other and themselves, almost implicit, just under or a little further into the surface. Maybe Garbo's own self-knowledge, encountering this creative opportunity, released something in her, that made its way to the screen like it never had before.
But what? That pop psych really doesn't explain all the results of her artistry here, and Harvey doesn't try to, he just watches and learns what he can, makes notes, makes a narrative of it he can watch in his head, like Thalberg and Gottleib and others.

The brilliant Swedish director *Mauritz Stiller*---actually Finnish (and Jewish, AKA Moishe), but mostly known as a key early Swedish director, who cast greenhorn Greta Gustaffson (and may have renamed her)in and into Gösta Berlings saga, based on Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf's 1891 novel of the same name, which, long before the movie came out in 1924, was a stone cold classic, and it was a patriotic duty to give Stiller all the time and money he needed to make it (this did not work in Hollywood, natch.)
Gottlieb says Swedish coverage was mostly concerned with how faithful to the novel, but Stiller saw that the Germans were more appreciative of him and Greta as artists, so he took her there.

PS: she long outlived relationships with Stiller, Schlee, Beaton, also the men themselves, and a lot of other people in this book.

John Gilbert, still sweet and young, boyish, even, yet a veteran star, took her under his wing and into his heart, then gradually turned their life together into A Star Is Born, for a while.

(More interesting, especially the way it turned with him, out than the movie[s].)

I loved the book.

EIGHT DETECTIVES after 70pp is going well. It seems to contain of detective stories nested within a meta-story. So far a great concept, very intriguing, prompting thought about genre and narration.

Wolfgang Hilbig - The Interim
William Shakespeare - Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare - Othello

The Interim is the latest of a series of works, all translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and (mostly, if not all) published on Two Lines Press. Probably one of the main achievements of that whole ecology of translated lit to come out over the last ten years. In this particular work, the narrator is recounting his trips between East and West Germany, from his humble beginnings working in a manual labour role in the East to fame as a published writer in the West. Not that this makes him much happier in his life...but also not exactly sadder either, in fact its a life in this sorta permanent 'Interim' (there are some wonderful descriptions of train trips and looking at stations and shopping malls). Its a bit like how I'd imagine (not having read) Solzhenitsyn's work post fall of communism, without the chauvinism and nationalism that a lot of people accuse him of (and I've been reminded of recently). Hilbig's writing on sex and relationships was a highlight. I read it with this recent ILB thread in mind (male authors writing female POVs & vice versa: possibly ilb’s worst thread title) it feels really well drawn, how the narrator goes from being this virile man to a lump of decayed flesh and nerves. There is a sensitivity and honesty present.

I followed this with a couple of Shakespeare's tragedies. Its my first read of them.

A&C is fun! Enobarbus is my favorite of Shakespeare's weary James Mason characters. But, god, so many bit parts with one lines.

Had a look through A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry pratchett his collectiion of non fictiion essays etc. Now hoping i didn't already get this cos I picked up this copy on Saturday.
Interesting stuff.

Had a look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited hi slook back at some of the ideas he had used during Brave New World to show how they compared to the real world.

Working away at David Treuer's heartbeat of Wounded Knee which I'm enjoying though it is pretty depressing in its depiction of the betrayal of indigenous population's faith etc.

David Toop Flutter Echo
Memoir by avant garde multiinstrumentalist. Pretty good so far.
JUst got this through as an interlibrary loan after the Irish system has just been reshuffled. You can now see book covers on the website .
So that's like cool like.

Also just picked up Ron Nagel's book on Islams Black Slaves which si a sequel to his Black Diaspora which I got last year but have not read yet. Thought I'd have a look to see if i could find Gramsci's prison diaries which I had a go at a couple of years ago but didn't get very far into. But that was out and this was on the shelf in roughly the same area.

EIGHT DETECTIVES reaches a chapter called 'An Inferno in Theatre Land'. A burning building down the street, while quite separately, it seems, a civilian woman is enlisted to manage a murder scene above a restaurant. Remarkable, as the dialogue gathers strangeness. One of this novel's appealing features is how far most of its inset stories are set back in the past - the 1950s? earlier? - with a gentle sense of pastiche, and characters in a different setting from ours (technologically, etc). But the actual era is not always clear. It's puzzling for instance if this story is set in the 1930s but begins in an East Asian restaurant in central London - I admit I didn't know that any had existed then.

"Casanova's Chinese Restaurant", the fifth(?) part of A Dance to the Music of Time, is set in the thirties IIRC and the titular restaurant its in the theatre land neck of the woods.

"Eight Detectives" sounds good!

Thanks Tim, an excellent fact.

Got me wondering whether if Eight Detectives is, as you say, pastichey, it might actually use the Powell as source material.

The 33 1/3 on ABBA Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli already feels like an artifact from a bygone era, both in its discussion of the technology (compilations might soon become obsolete because ppl can pick their fave songs...and burn them onto a CD!) and in its positioning within the discourse, which laments that praise of the group always has to be defensive while failing to break out of that mode herself. Difficult to imagine that level of baggage now when ABBA's return was greeted with pretty much universal fondness. As it is the author makes things a bit too easy for herself, pointing out the obvious sexism and homophobia that's part of critic's rejection of ABBA while failing to engage with the fact that a lot of the animosity also stemmed from a perceived lack of Afro-American influences (Vincentelli includes an admitidely offensive Xgau quote that mentions this but doesn't respond to it); it is to my mind both questionable whether that's actually true and, if true, not automatically a reason for dismissal, but I don't like that she doesn't talk about it at all; if you're gonna tackle the isms you can't cherry pick. Likewise her final conclusion that ABBA allows you to be a weirdo is kinda willfully ignoring that the vast majority of their fanbase were anything but - if anything you could say ABBA make it ok to be normal.

Choosing a compilation is an interesting move, and it's def their Classic Album, but while the creation of the compilation itself was a pretty engaging read obv it's not enough for an entire book, so the author then goes song by song ordered around the albums they appeared on, which is ultimately unsatisfying as well.

>>> her final conclusion that ABBA allows you to be a weirdo is kinda willfully ignoring that the vast majority of their fanbase were anything but

Yes - a preposterous claim.

Next week: "Being a fan of Simply Red's STARS made me stand out from the crowd - but I learned to love the fact that I'm not like anybody else".

Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle. This was a book in my book club several years ago and I missed out that month. I've finally got around to reading it. It's a pretty compelling narrative. It seems to me to be a meditation, or maybe a thought experiment, that asks the question, What if the outcasts that often end up taking out their angst on others, usually violently, turn that violence on themselves--and survive? How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape? A worthy read.

I finished Herodotus. It picks up considerably in the final third, but he still runs after every digression, giving equal weight to world-shaking battles and trivia. My overall impression is that if one can suspend the desire to know which details are factual, which are rumor-mongering and which are pure folktales, he gives the fullest possible picture of greek culture of his era. He was the chronicler of greek normcore.

I've started reading The Flâneur, Edmund White, one of those books where the author just writes about whatever comes to mind, as a sort of monologue version of 'table talk'. It's pleasant and convivial.

How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape? Central to his books that I've read (which are all except the first, Master of Reality), and many of his best songs. Question before that also often pertains. I'll have to read MoR, his first (in the xpost 33 1/3 series, so a response to the album of same title), and re-read the two since WIWV, but that one's a genius consolidation, if there is such a thing.

I owe Edmund White for introducing me to the term xpost

How does someone go on living through what most of us would consider an intolerable situation, and what are the limits and consolations of escape?

This is a great distillation and pretty much sums up Master of Reality too - a book which didn't add up to much when I read it but which I think about often.

I finished James Shapiro's 1599, which like 1606: The Year of Lear wears its considerable learning lightly and which has sent me back to Hamlet and Henry V, looking for new things.

Not really sure what to read over Easter. I have A Place of Greater Safety, Priestdaddy and, uh, a Reacher book lined up.

Interestingly, Darnielle claims to have written the last chapter of WIWV first.

"I just started typing it up and it ended with a guy shooting himself and I said, 'Well, that’s not a good story.' So then I wrote a bunch of other chapters with no direction at all."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_in_White_Van#:~:text=The%20title%20Wolf%20In%20White%20Van%20is%20a,song%20Six%2C%20Sixty%2C%20Six%20is%20played%20in%20reverse.

My only complaint about The Flâneur so far is that it explains flâneurie quite well, but engages in it metaphorically far more than literally. I had hopes for more street-wandering and crowd-gazing. As disappointments go, I'd say that's a trivial one.

I've just realised I've read the Wilson book - as part of the 'Writer and the City' collection. I'm going to be honest and say I don't remember a huge amount about it but I do recall thinking I'd read it again next time I went to Paris (whenever that might be). I loved Peter Carey's addition to that series, 30 Days in Sydney.

Greatly enjoyed

To The Finland Station.

EIGHT DETECTIVES approaches its end. A basic fact about this ingenious, compelling novel remains that the frame story seems less well crafted and compelling than the embedded stories, which often have terrific ingenuity; as well as, again, being fine exercises in pastiche.

I'm also oddly unsure when the frame story is actually set - the early 1970s? Strange for it to be so unspecified.

a visit from the goon squad
everyone remembers their formative years
why are they so compelling
detective stories are for ingenuity in plot devices and as a challenge to the reader in interpreting c(l)ues
i imagine they are for the reader who likes to solve puzzles and problems of a certain kind
but has the nature of the problem to solve been thoroughly explored by the genre

still reading war & peace, hoping to finish before I leave for a 3-week work engagement but that's looking decreasingly likely. it's utterly fantastic.

which translation are you reading?

March 28, 1972 pic.twitter.com/MvKCBEAkSb

— Peanuts On This Day (@Peanuts50YrsAgo) March 30, 2022

W&P was my first pandemic novel and I gobbled it up in eight blissful days.

tom mccarthy's THE MAKING OF INCARNATION

impressive (if less so than it thinks it is), interesting, rather less than the sum of its parts. the characters go various places so the reader can learn about intellectual property law, taylorism, motion-capture technology, modern movie-making, the properties of windows, etc. but have no other purpose. for a while it seems like there's a plot, but in the end there just . . . isn't

also two characters, almost laughably, have sex for no reason and to no purpose. it's as if the author thought 'well, let's make this a bit less bloodless' and then inserted a couple emotionless lines noting that they hooked up. (it's barely mentioned in passing and not graphic at all, which is just as well, although i'm grimly curious about what a full-on mccarthy sex scene would be like)

i have nothing against egan and i know this is publicist patter but my god could you specifically create something i'd less want to read

From one of the most celebrated writers of our time, a literary figure with cult status, a "sibling novel" to her Pulitzer Prize– and NBCC Award–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad -- an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private.

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is "one of those tech demi-gods with whom we're all on a first name basis." Bix is 40, with four kids, restless, desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or "externalizing" memory. It's 2010. Within a decade, Bix's new technology, "Own Your Unconscious" -- that allows you access to every memory you've ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others -- has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding interlocking narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also extraordinarily moving, a testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption. In the world of Egan's spectacular imagination, there are "counters" who track and exploit desires and there are "eluders," those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles -- from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter and a chapter of tweets.

If Goon Squad was organized like a concept album, The Candy House incorporates Electronic Dance Music's more disjunctive approach. The parts are titled: Build, Break, Drop. With an emphasis on gaming, portals, and alternate worlds, its structure also suggests the experience of moving among dimensions in a role-playing game.

The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away.

a chapter of tweets

They forgot to mention the waffle party.

I wrote to a magazine offering to review that novel. They completely ignored me.

I finished EIGHT DETECTIVES. It maintained the twists to the end.

Then I started Isaac Asimov's FOUNDATION (1951). I had imagined FOUNDATION as a vast, lengthy, demanding project, and I realise that there are several more books - maybe they're bigger. But what's surprising to me is that this first book is only 230 modest pages, highly readable, zips by - I was halfway through after a day of not reading it very solidly. That's refreshing.

The book narrates the decline of a Galactic Empire, and the rise of a Foundation that seems to be designed to preserve knowledge against this decline, over a period of - decades at least, maybe it will become centuries or millennia. The scale is already vast. I expect it gets vaster as the books go on. There is a sense of Asimov playing a canny, wry sense of enduring realpolitik against his knowledge of science and higher things. So far, after over 100pp, the book includes no women characters.

Back to Mande Music by Eric Charry
just onto the bit about the Guitar and groups. Which may be he section I was mainly looking for when getting the book.

Peter Barry beginning Theory
still reading through this and finding it pretty interesting. It's part of a series of introductory books on various facets of art, culture, literature etc. The copy I'm reading is about 15 years old and I know it has been updated since. So wondering if that means details updated or generally rewritten in total. Anyway I';m finding it rewarding but do wonder if I would be better served reading the recent one. Though a book in the hand is worth 2 in the bush and all like that.

finished
David Toop Flutter Echo
his memoir published by Ecstatic Peace. Really interesting read. I was going to order his Into The Maelstrom but it appears to have been destroyed or not returned. Not entirely sure what the term write-off on the library system means.
Anyway did enjoy and does triegger me to want to look more into his work. I'm semi familiar with him . Got some stuff Simon Finn, some of the Virgin compilations he did. & I think Ocean of Sound though not sure why no others if that is true.

also Walter Rodney Russian Revolution
the book compiled/edited from his teaching notes for the course he taught in Tanzania.
Again seriously enjoying and hoping to investigate more of his work. Waiting for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa through the interlibrary thing too.

& buying a load of books from charity shops. Possibly too many bu it is giving me some exercise in walking between the ones dotted around town,. But I have less dosh now so need to not overindulge myself. Also don't have as much space as this entails . May need to rethink certain habits but I have turned up a lot of interesting stuff. Now to reinvent time so I can read it all.

just finishing jack black "you can't win", just starting jose saramago "blindness"

Wow I'm really glad I didn't read any marketing copy before I started Candy House (or Goon Squad, for that matter -- I went in cold a couple of years ago, knowing only that it has been much-praised on this forum). Not sure why every sales pitch for these books makes them sound so shite (I have some theories), but it's definitely one of those "fans make it hard to love the band" situations.

Various - The Tragic History of the Sea. All of the pieces in this book are accounts of Portuguese travellers and their journeys to establish African colonies in the 17th century. I found out about it after reading an interview with a blogger who gave the items in this compilation as examples of the earliest, good Portuguese prose -- as oposed to France having a Rabelais or Italy having a Boccaccio, and while none of the writing is on that level I can see his point. These accounts veer from what they attempt to be, which is something like a functional guide of snakes that future explorers should avoid in their quests, to these tales of losses...whether that's of life or health or nerve, with the constant need to keep moving to survive from one day to the next, and with some embellishments for sure (that's where a thing is on a path to becoming a literature of sorts, from one POV anyway). Its like an almanac of grotesqueries mixed with a religious fervour, where God is repetitiously thanked whenever fortune shines on these explorers, and no faith is ever shaken when a bad thing happens (which is often enough).

I finished FOUNDATION and have started Ian Sansom: THE SUSSEX MURDER (2019).

Will keep an eye out for The Tragic History of the Sea, thanks.

(or Goon Squad, for that matter -- I went in cold a couple of years ago, knowing only that it has been much-praised on this forum) Also much denounced, alas---on ILB, it's the Bizarro World The Mountain Lion.

My current book is A Small Town in Germany, John LeCarre. It was published after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but prior to the George Smiley series. His approach in this is well advanced toward his final voice, but he was still only half-formed as a writer. My reissue edition includes an Introduction by LeCarre from the mid-90s in which he clearly expresses his overall dissatisfaction with the book. It's not as bad as all that, especially after he gets past the somewhat clumsy early exposition and the characters take over from the plot as the force moving the story.

about to tackle the behemoth that is john cowper powys's a glastonbury romance

Good luck! How many pages is that one again?

I like the fact that THE MOUNTAIN LION is ILB's favourite book.

FWIW Smiley is the protagonist of two - very compelling - novels before THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, as well as featuring in that novel itself.

A woman character did appear in FOUNDATION on about p.188 out of 234. She was the wife of a planetary ruler. She was sharp-tongued and critical. She knuckled down when given a trinket. But she later appeared again and was still sharp-tongued.

That was literally the only woman in the book. I believe that this balance changes slightly as the FOUNDATION series goes on. I'll find it, to a degree, if I manage to read more of the series.

1/3 through THE SUSSEX MURDER which is the 4th or 5th in a series of THE COUNTY GUIDES, a series that Ian Sansom seems to have concocted to get a secure publishing and creative platform. In the 1930s a polymathic professor and his beautiful daughter travel England, accompanied by the narrator, researching for guides to the English counties (a bit like Pevsner but less architectural?). Seemingly, in each county they encounter a crime and have to solve it. However, 1/3 through this they still haven't got near the crime (except that the crime is mentioned on the first page). So these are detective novels with the balance only 50% or so detection and the other half comedy and travelogue. There is a great deal of historical pastiche and detail that Sansom will have enjoyed. The heroine lives in the Isokon Building in Hampstead. The Professor knows A.A. Milne. The narrator has a long scene around the top of Brick Lane in the era of its market and pie & mash shops. The interest of particular places is a very big part of the appeal. Overall it's very well done save that it could be handled with a lighter, less repetitive touch.

xposts: in the edition i have it comes to 1100 pages of text. suspect this might take me some time to get through!

Sue Steward Salsa : musical heartbeat of Latin America
which was a recommendation in David Toop's Flutter Echo since he set her on teh way to discovering the music concerned . Haven't really started it beyond reading teh Willie Colon introduction but trying to get into it.l Seems like something I m gooing to want to know a lot more about anyway.

Hip, the history John Leland
a book on the history of what is considered to be what's happening etc cutting edge like amongst the tuned in and so on.
I had seen this while browsing through the new Irish library system over teh last couple of weeks since that was set up. Think I'd even flagged it asa thing I would be interested in reading. Then went into town yesterday and went looking for a book by Gramsci which I didn't find but did see this . So gonna be reading this. well one of a pile of things i have on teh go anyway and now have a bunch of things goingto land on me over tyhe next couple of weeks after pursuing books i requested taht have just sat in the system as 'Available' for ages.
Well this could be good and should turn me on to some things I'm not already familiar with.

finished
Walter Rodney Russian Revolution A third World Perspective
David Toop Flutter Echo
Mande Music Eric Charry or at least on last 10 pages. This is pretty good and I want to read more and hear more.

A Glastonbury Romance is bonkers and all over the place and very great. Humblebrag or whatever but I dragged a copy around in a backpack in the South Pacific. The heat melted the binding glue, so I discarded chunks of pages as I read them.

Think you might just win ILB with that post.

Also, reminds me of some story I think I heard about Anthony Burgess smuggling a chopped up copy of Ulysses on his person across the border so as not to run afoul of the censors.

Which border?

After weeks of reading and prepping for articles and classes, finally got back to some full books read for pleasure, including Quartz Hearts by Clark Coolidge and Heroic Dose by Matt Longabucco. Ilxors into poetry might be interested in the latter— chatty and beautiful without being too dependent on epiphanic moments.

Which border?

In Little Wilson and Big God, he claims a teacher ‘had brought it back from illiberal Nazi Germany in the two-volume Odyssey Press edition’, while in Here Comes Everybody, his critique of the works of Joyce, he recalls his acquisition of the novel: ‘As a schoolboy I sneaked the two-volume Odyssey Press edition into England, cut up into sections and distributed all over my body’.

https://www.anthonyburgess.org/banned-books/anthony-burgess-censorship-ulysses/

a chapter of tweets

― mookieproof, Monday, 11 April 2022 02:30 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf i read several chapters of these every day

according to the internet the first recorded chinese restaurant in london opened in 1908 in Glasshouse Street near Piccadilly Circus -- it was called the Chinese Restaurant (clever name) (i imagine the chinese community that was active in limehouse in the early 1800s also had its own eating houses, but they weren't the kinds of places the anthony powells of 1810 wd be frequenting)

Believe Burgess told yet a third version in M/F.

Holidays back home means all Portuguese language reading list:

The Living And The Rest, José Eduardo Águalusa - Published in Portuguese, forthcoming in English. Angolan novel about a writer's congress on a tiny island off Mozambique getting cut off from the rest of the world. Always a bit suspicious of writers writing about the life of the writer, unless it's autobio, seems a bit indicative of having lost touch with anything else to write about. But I ended up enjoying this, especially for its insights into the intergenerational dynamics as well as those between writers of different African countries. Particularly liked one writer going off on a rant against local supersitions because "then when I write a realist novel critics end up talking about magical realism!". The island atmosphere also well captured; the mystery of their isolation alas sometimes a bit reminiscent of the TV show Lost. The author's stand in is described as a journalist who gave up his good work in that field to write mediocre novels - that is in fact Águalusa's CV, and the only journalistic work of his I've read, A Stranger In Goa, is indeed a bit better than this.

A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel - Argentinian author who apparently has written many books on books and reading, though I'd never stumbled upon him before. Read to Borges after he went blind! Anyway, this is twenty years old, a sort of trawl through the man's favourite books with the backdrop of moving to a small village in France and living through the world's events (lots of talk of the Iraq war and Le Pen pére getting good results). It's now been reissued in Portugal - Manguel currently lives in Lisbon - with a new chapter focusing on a Portuguese book. A lot of name dropping and dick waving, as there's bound to be in this sort of exercise, and his trick of dropping in a sentence by some unrelated author that's supposed to effortlessly sum up a situation gets a bit old. But he's indeed well read and some of the descriptions are very well done.

O Susto, Agustina Bessa-Luís - The foremost chronicler of 20th century Portugal's upper classes. Often scathing, but not any sort of marxist critique, nor is it Wodehouse-style comedy about the idle rich. Antonioni might be a point of comparison, but being a writer instead of a director, she takes a lot of advantage of the passing of time; all the books of hers I've read so far take in lives from birth to death, a succession of stages of vanity, melancholia and decay. This one's a thinly disguised fictionalised biography of the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes - his family protested, which is understandable considering how they were portrayed; the introduction insists that Bessa Luís saw Pascoaes as an idol, and indeed within the novel his stand in's work is often referred to as brilliant, but the man himself does come across as weak, passive, devoid of life. I've not read any of Pascoae's poetry, did read his essay on "the art of being Portuguese", which struck me as fascist nonsense.

Bessa Luís's style is really something else, every paragraph contains these seemingly vague pronouncements that, if digested properly, give you insights into not just the characters themselves but the entire society they exist in. Really she should be read a page a day, certainly not in large chunks on planes like I did; not an author served well by the eagerness to finish as many books as possible, as quickly as possible.

Anyway, this novel isn't available in English, and unlike other works of her, not in French either. So I'd usually not write about it on here, what would be the point, but in this particular case I did have to mention that Fernando Pessoa, whom many here know and enjoy, makes an appearance. He is portrayed as a drunk, whose poetry deeply angers the Pascoaes stand-in, as does his indifference towards arguing over these matters. Later the main character learns that he has died, and is struck by a deep sense of loss, at not having been able to tell him that his anger stemmed, in the end, from love. He hears that, on his deathbed, the Pessoa stand-in's main concern was that he keep his eyes closed, so no one could close them for him after he died.

Read to Borges after he went blind!

Manguel is really keen for everyone to know this iirc

not before he went deaf tho iirc

He’s a pampas wizard iirc

But perhaps I shouldn’t comment since these days he’s out of my compass.

recent reads:

Fanny Howe - Night Philosophy
Lewis Warsh - One Foot Out the Door (collected short stories)
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
Stanley Elkin - Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers

just starting Bernadette Mayer's Work and Days

i need to reread the bely at some point, might try one of the other translations.

The heat melted the binding glue, so I discarded chunks of pages as I read them.

awesome. didn't happen to be the picador edition by any chance? purposely avoided getting one of those due to their spine issues. also reading it in the south pacific, but given the season little chance of meltage!

only 3 chapters in, but bonkers it is.

Ah 'preciate the way Brad Watson's novel Miss Jane gets the sectionality in the intersectionality of Deep South small-town-and-country life, the isolation that can be more of family situation and occupation, also self-image and terrain, than of distance as the crow flies---also, of course, there are boundaries of class, race, income, education---but here it's more about going down the road just a little way, or turning a corner anywhere, and finding a distinction, sometimes an unexpected variation---the plot does this, minus what might be called twists, but to sometimes startling effect, before the plausibility bumps in as well, given what's already happened, not too predictably, since the author's enough of a stage magician to slip in distractions between the feats---also, it covers a lot of ground, in time as well as space, discreetly fleet.
Veteran short story writer and novelist has long since absorbed the lessons of Dubliners re inner and outer realities of private and social life, also As I Lay Dying, re shifting POVS, good shell games---he's no genius, but he knows his stuff. The title character, Jane Chisholm, is based on his own great-aunt, born with a "uro-genital irregularity, " as the family doctor, her only confidante, puts it, in frequent correspondence over the decades with a friend and med school classmate at Johns Hopkins, still in a JH-related practice and relevant specialty---reminding me, though he isn't mentioned, that the well-named Dr. John Money became known for this kind of surgery (also sex changes, as they were once called, which could include medical decisions made in infancy---eventually, in the wake of Money in particular, there were repercussions). The novel continues into the 80s, the Money era, but I won't tell you how it ends.
Only reservation is that she is a little simpler than necessary, though not one-note. Born to a family of intelligent, resourceful, isolated characters, she also turns out to have some of their temper. Realizing that her blind date probably has a "debilitating war wound, " as students of Hemingway once dutifully put, and that this is her unlikely matchmaker's idea of a charity unfuck, Miss Jane doesn't like that, and reacts accordingly.

That is, Dr. Money became best-known (and eventually notorious) for this kind of practice while at Johns Hopkins.

And it could have specifically included Dr. Money, being the kind of novel about the Deep South that does take my mind around and isn't in awe of its own unities. Should say that, aside from evidence on the page, I know some of what Watson studied because I went to school with him for a while, when he was in the Creative Writing program and I wasn't, but our link was more via a long-dead, much-missed mutual friend, so I'm biased in his favor, though I've been aware of teh Creative Writing excesses of some others from our neck of the woods, so think I'd be aware of his (he is more into description, sometimes, than I care about, but if you want to know just how Miss Jane's father made his excellent untaxed whiskey, you got it. Nothing that can't be quickly skipped, a graf here and there)(and he's so right about "dusty light," apparently sourceless, whether you're under the trees or not: another reason to call it the Deep South)(and this town is named Mercury, somewhut ironically, though another thing slipped in, or anyway I for one just now got it).
Also I know some of what he studied and assimilated because of his afterword here, mentioning medical sources and WC Williams' stories about or including boondocks doctors, also his own granddaughter, who read an early draft and told him, "Put in a peacock, Pappy." "So I did, and that changed everything."
'

After that I read A Handful of Dust, deadpan snarky-to-more-serious as expected, scooping through the hive social activities and equally auto-to-desperate personal fixations of white privileged youth between wars---published in 1934, with no mention of the Depression or what's brewing in Germany, The Great War mentioned only re those members of the club who are too young to have "been in the war"(pretty much everybody who's anybody), though the title comes from The Waste Land, as quoted upfront. Lots of effective detail, gravels crunching by, though last part of book seems unduly sympathetic to the husband and turns to stunt writing as well, though the old bad guy's fixation fits overall context.

Pretty good for Waugh, although I read Scoop (1938) first, and liked it better: both have the succinct density and drive, but Scoop is more dynamic, with a greater variety of characters, many drawn into The Daily Beast's international shit-stirring: gets racist on the fly, but the Africans are the main victims of blind idiot god power auto-sprees, blaspheming against God and nature and maybe the Old Glory of Real England and Real Men, with time for some cuet corny romance near the battlefield.

He's no Elizabeth Bowen, but yeah, pretty good for himself, in these books.

I am reading The Women Troubadours, Meg Bogin, which seems to be the only book published in English on this subject that anyone can lay their hands on. It does include bilingual texts of all the extant poems, but so far I've only read the introductory essay, which is very good.

Never heard of female troubadours, more info please!

xpost to indicate that Waugh emphasizes Africans as main victims is prob giving him too much credit, but they certainly get hit by the shit stirred.

Bowen! I'd never considered a comparison. I put down A World of Love on Saturday b/c it strains to be Woolfian in effect (I'm a fan of Friends and Relations and The Death of a Heart).

I finished THE SUSSEX MURDER. It's quite good for conveying information about Sussex (and other things) and stimulating curiosity. I think that's a big part of what the author is about here. I also happen to have just seen an actual Sussex guide from 1957 which is rather reminiscent of the one the character in the novel is writing in 1937. The one way this novel really falls down is as a crime novel. The crime / detection element only occupies a third of it at most. Also, the writing can be heavy-handed, repeating certain tics and padding space. It could have been given another round of editing. But on balance it's relatively edifying. I am up for reading other books in the series.

I then started H.G. Wells, THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901). It starts in a bucolic Kentish setting (as THE WAR OF THE WORLDS does in Surrey), then develops through a kind of 'Hard SF' (discussion of fictional / extrapolative science and how a new invention will work) into the two unattached males floating to the moon in a zero-gravity sphere. On the moon they don't need spacesuits - there is *more* oxygen on the moon than on Earth! They see snow and plants that grow extremely fast. Then they see actual lunar creatures. This vision of the moon is fantastical and 'wrong' in real-world predictive terms, but not wholly - for instance they leap unexpectedly far in the low gravity of the lunar landscape, something that real astronauts would later experience. The novel seems significant in the history of SF. It also bears comparison with THE TIME MACHINE, re: the lunar creatures and their underground world, compared to that of the Morlocks.

when i read this book as a small boy i imagined the "cavorite" that enables anti-gravity motion to be a kind of marmite, which you spread on yr spaceship with a butterknife

Lol

the film seem to be on tv every school holiday when i was a kid. and is also on quite frequently on the minor Freeview channels these days.

Finished The Farthest Shore, the third Earthsea book. I found it pretty dull and preachy compared to the first two books, which are stone cold thrill-powered classics — but the ending was strong and cut strangely deep. Looking forward to Tehanu.

Bowen! I'd never considered a comparison. I put down A World of Love on Saturday b/c it strains to be Woolfian in effect (I'm a fan of Friends and Relations and The Death of a Heart). I've never read her novels, don't know how they compare tp his, but a lot of Bowen's Collected Stories go deeper and further in different directions with some of the same themes, times, related characterizations.

Read a few little books and also Karen Brodine's 'Illegal Assembly,' certainly her best book of poem-- we still get Brodine the militant working-class socialist dyke, but there's some stuff going on beyond polemic, and the line breaks feel more present in many of the poems.

In a day or so I finished THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.

The protagonist Bedford is quite tough and ruthless, and openly has aims of colonising the moon and taking its wealth. He kills some ‘Selenite’ lunar beings (I had to deduce eventually that Selenite was a word for classical roots, not a random one that Welles had made up, hence the familiarity assumed with it), fighting his way out of the inside of the moon like a precursor of Han Solo in the Death Star. He finds the flying antigrav sphere alone and flies it back to Earth, landing very conveniently back on ... the coast of Kent. He is then reasonably content for a boy to board the craft and fly off to oblivion in it, while banking the gold from the moon, and to write up his story for publication – which leads to contact from an astronomer who has intercepted messages from the scientist Cavor. Cavor surprisingly survived on the moon, saw more of the inside, describes the hyper-'specialised' bodies that Selenites have developed (a precursor to Sheckley's 'Specialist'), even meets the Grand Lunar – and his talk here of humans' propensity to war leads the Selenites to kill Cavor before he can lead any more Earthlings to attack them.

This whole last 60pp is conceptually interesting but such an odd form of narrative, like the long digression in The War of the Worlds. I thought Wells was a master popular storyteller - it's odd in that context to find him using such disjointed methods.

I then started Willy Vlautin, DON'T STEP OUT ON ME (2018). This describes a farmhand of white and Native American heritage, in Nevada, who moves to Tucson AZ to become a boxer. He hasn't yet begun his boxing career as I'm 75pp in.

So far features are:

* a Hemingway-esque plain style: maybe less determinedly brief and brisk than Hemingway but still noticeably matter of fact.
* a strong feeling that it could be a film, or could want to be made into a film. It's easy to picture it as a Sundance movie.
* a slightly surprising sense that the boxer, Horace, is a *good person*, as are his de facto adopted family, and that part of the novel's project is to depict good, kind people and see how they fare in a world that is not always so good and kind. I'll see how this works out.

I finished The Women Troubadours. It was necessarily short, since so few poems or names have come down the ages, but it is excellently constructed and the original texts & her translations are very interesting to anyone who takes an interest in such things.

I finished Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Carcopino. It basically does what it says on the tin, so its recommended if you have an interest in the subject matter. (Some wag on Twitter posted that when a bookish man reaches a certain age he must adopt one of the following interests: WWII, Civil War, Ancient Rome, etc. I guess I feel seen.)

Next I read a fantastic autobiography in verse, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley by Jimmy Santiago Baca. I also grew up in the American Southwest and found his evocation of that landscape to be very resonant.

Currently I'm reading another autobiographical work, My Struggle: Vol 4 by Knausgaard.

I read a book called Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods a couple of decades ago. sounded like it might be interesting, think it was but may need to reread it if I still have it.
But yeah interesting to see how a bunch of people of similar intellect to the population of today would spend their time in a much different time. I think I've seen things like taht from a number of different eras too.

Certainly it is possible to fill up all one's time with endless trivia concerning WWII, the US Civil War, or the history of ancient Rome, but taking any interest at all in the world around you and where it came from will include some reading in those areas. I look at the other books you mention and I think you're safe from Roman history becoming a hobby horse you ride to death.

I don't think it (Rome) has reached obsession stage for me yet. It does seem to be wear most of my historical nonfiction reading is concentrated these days though.

read HARROW by joy williams, which is somewhat like alice in post-apocolypticland

not sure it really held together as a novel but she writes wonderful sentences suffused by rage

(Some wag on Twitter posted that when a bookish man reaches a certain age he must adopt one of the following interests: WWII, Civil War, Ancient Rome, etc. I guess I feel seen.)

I saw this (think the list actually said Mongols or other ancient stuff and *not* US Civil War), and I broadly get the joke, but as 'observational comedy' I find it also strangely inaccurate. I know many males over 40 and I don't think I know a single one who is obsessed with one of these things. Maybe the one exception, now I think of it, is ILX poster 'DV' from Dublin who did become an expert on WWI (which I think was not one of the listed topics).

But equally, I think it's good to have such interests and expertise, and not very helpful to mock them. And poster Aimless is correct: knowledge of them could be seen as a valid part of general knowledge.

interesting to see how a bunch of people of similar intellect to the population of today would spend their time in a much different time

I was thinking about this recently.

People from the past (say, Medieval peasants) seem to have thought quite differently from us.

And yet they had pretty much identical brains.

So why aren't we more similar?

A large daft question.

Finished Shape of Things by Greil Marcus
which was somewhat interesting and does feature Pere Ubu and Twin peaks quite heavily but may need to be revisited to be fully encapsulated. Like.
Well has some interesting suggestions for further watching and listening and things. I guess.

differences in thinking between different ages if one takes there to be a constant array of intelligence in the different environments and maybe diet doesn't quite make things like taht constant.
Would think it had a lot to do with what one was influenced by at what times and what one thought could or shouldn't be thought and what prevailing epistemology would be. Also how much constraint things like religion and peer pressure had. So how much thought was kept covert and therefore not documented etc.

There's always chance elements taht have later consequences and influence etc. Waves, fads, representation and noise.
& so on.

I think the questioning as to why the difference is a large part of the process , larger than actually finding a fixed constant quantifiable answer cos I don't think you can really fully nail those things down. & the process of questioning has the effect of turning up new things, innovations etc. Like. Asking how long is a piece of string is probably the wrong focus whereas what you need it for or what you want to know for may be a bit better focus.

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (book club read) - Central conceit of this is a bunch of children got killed by a German bomb during WWII. But what if they hadn't? Book then checks in on these children every couple of decades. This makes it enjoyable social history; my wife said it reminded her of the Up series, which is an apt comparison. However: these kids grow up to have very ordinary lives, as interesting as anyone else's, which kinda lets down the sense of loss which I guess the original premise is meant to evoke. They live lives much like millions of others, if they had died others would still have lived similar ones. And yeah OF COURSE any death is tragic, it would be evil to mourn only the extraordinary, etc. But it does raise the question of why go with this premise in the first place? A bunch of unconnected lives wouldn't be enough for a novel without it?

(think the list actually said Mongols or other ancient stuff and *not* US Civil War)

Yes, you’re right. Your memory is better than mine. It’s probably not broadly true. Actually the idea seems a bit quaint these days, more men my age probably are more interested in comic books than any historical period. I find it fascinating to try to imagine myself in one of those times. At some point one has lived long enough to see some changes in society and the material substrate of daily life (this happens more rapidly now than it used to) and so the puzzle of how human personality has adapted to different conditions becomes more interesting. Rome is interesting because it’s the oldest period for which we have a very rich record. The Middle Ages is also fascinating. Carlo Ginzburg has written some books on how ordinary people viewed the world in those days which I want to read, I think one was reviewed in the LRB recently.

It was.

I would like to read LIGHT PERPETUAL. In fact I am rather encouraged by the news that its characters do not turn out very special. But I'm mainly interested because I believe it touches on geographical areas somewhat familiar to me.

I am now reading The English Teacher, R.K. Narayan. He was one of the rare novelists who could tell an interesting story about quite ordinary people in ordinary circumstances doing ordinary things. There's a touch of gentle humor in him that shines in all his books.

In the mood for a little light reading, I returned to Caihm McDonnell, who has put out a few since I last read him. Finished Dead Man's Sins and am mostly through with The Quiet Man. Fairly standard police/detective fare from a writer who, I think, started as a standup comic (?). Fairly formulaic, but he writes good dialogue and he's just fucking funny.

finished Chasers by Stephen Ira, a fine book of queer love poems.

getting back into Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World, which is good tho not as engaging as her more recent book, but that might just be a result of the more recent book being primarily about her partner’s death.

read HARROW by joy williams, which is somewhat like alice in post-apocolypticland

not sure it really held together as a novel but she writes wonderful sentences suffused by rage

― mookieproof

Cheers. I discovered her short fiction in October -- impressed.

I was impressed by her early fiction: first novel, State of Grace(1973) (Florida Gothic, kinda early Patti Smith x Joan Didion), and 70s stories that made it into her first collection, Taking Care (1982). Was put off by fairly recent New Yorker story, but maybe I'll try again (maybe pick up where I left off).

Watch out for some Joyce Carol Oates-level snobbery in interview quotes.

like the pinefox, i've been reading hg wells -- a couple weeks ago i finally read "the island of dr moreau," which i've been hearing about all my life. it is almost hilariously fast-paced: as the book opens, the protagonist is escaping from a sinking ship into a fragile lifeboat, and a few pages later his two companions get in a fistfight and both fall out of the boat. a few pages later he's rescued, only to get kicked overboard for getting in an argument with the captain. then he's rescued again! but wait, it turns out it's the bad guys who rescued him! (why they bothered to rescue him is never really explained.) there are multiple chase scenes, and more than one scene where buildings get set on fire. and on and on and on! but it's masterfully done and, as with all of wells's earliest novels, very gripping. it's also quite grisly and rather upsetting in places: the basic concept (a mad vivisectionist who transforms animals into human-like beings, also for no real reason) is, thankfully, impossible. the last few pages turn quite wistful and melancholy in a way i associate with wells, who seems to me to have had a strong streak of instinctive pessimism despite being a progressive/socialist/futurist/etc.

i followed that up with another wells: "the food of the gods," the one about the food that makes plants and animals grow to giant-size. the first third of this book, which is about giant bees and wasps and cows terrorizing the english countryside, is delightful. the utterly blase reaction of many of the characters to this phenomenon is especially funny. the rest of the book, about the first giant-size humans' struggle to be treated with dignity, i found rather uninvolving and dull. i suspect there was some very specific 1904-era social satire here that flew right over my head.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

Bell hooks Teaching to Transgress.
hooks talking about a new form of pedagogy that is much more level with particular influence from Paulo Freire and a Buddhist monk called Thich Nhat Hanh.
I like bell hooks I find her very easy to read.
Had this on order since December through interlibrary loan and recently found that while there seemed to be a queue of readers there were also copies claiming to be available. I wound up ringing a couple of the libraries involved to see if I could get things moving and this turns up a week later. Which is really great. I thought I was a few behind and I would just get things faster if the people ahead of me got the available copy. But turned out even better.

Unfortunately this doesn't appear to have worked with the other book I got yesterday.
Blood and Land JCH King
Which is a native American history of America. More encyclopaedic than narrative.
It was ordered as
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz All The Real Indians Died Out.
I think it came from the same library and I'm assuming it was misfiled or something. That Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz appears to be vanishing from the system. I tried looking it up yesterday when I got home and couldn't find it. It is listed as such in my orders entry still but not through the search engine. Shame I want to read more of her work enjoyed An Indigenous People's History of the US .

In fact I am rather encouraged by the news that its characters do not turn out very special.

Feel like I should now add the caveat (spoiler): once character does spend some time in the entourage of a Rock star in 70's Laurel Canyon.

now i'm on to joseph conrad's "the secret agent." not enjoying it much, honestly: i've realized that i find conrad's style to be a bit of a slog -- i've enjoyed a short story here and there, but i find him tough to take in large doses. kinda eager to be done with this one so i can move onto something else.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.),

This was the novel that unlocked him for me, so if it doesn't work....

I've still not read much Conrad. Did enjoy some films of his work.
& Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost which gives the background for Heart Of Darkness not sure how completely incidentally. Conrad was a ship's captain dealing with the regime. Have heard he was more right wing than I would have liked, do hope he was disgusted by what he saw beyond it being a factor in a famous novel he wrote.

Good to hear about THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU - I was reading about it just recently and actually keen to read it.

I do like THE SECRET AGENT - a very cinematic / proto-Hitchcockian novel at times (never mind that Hitchcock literally adapted it)- with a great deal going on. Probably my favourite Conrad. I would certainly persevere with that.

Mine too. I'm also fond of Nostromo, which complicates the relations b/w natives and colonizers/imperialists.

Found The Secret Agent a slog too, until the last few chapters.

Conrad does tend to stomp into rooms with heavy boots.

hadn't realised that Conrad was born in what's now Ukraine so deeply topical like. Is anything being made of that right now.
I always though of him as Polish but the borders there had a major habit of changing over the centuries.

Yeah--Stanislaw Lem was born in Lyiv when it was in Poland (it's still only 40 miles from current border).

y’all have convinced me to persevere with the conrad! only about a third of the way through it so there’s hope for me yet. i had forgotten there was a hitchcock film of it —don’t think i ever saw that one.

Shirley Jackson The haunting Of Hill House
picked it up from a charity shop a while back and its been floating around for a while. I read teh first page a few months back and thought it was really something, descriptions of trees that seemed otherworldly. An opacity taht reminds me of Rowland S Howard's lyricism or something. THought yeah really need to read this then and then had a pile of books i was trying to get through.
Anyway, not feeling great earlier so I went an lay down thinking I'd get a lot further into a bell hooks book that I picked up yesterday and then wound up reading the first couple of chapters of this before getting to that. So the female protagonist has arrived at the house at the moment and nobody else has arrived yet. I'm enjoying her prose anyway.
So need to work out how to read this and several other things really rapidly.

I like her short fiction even better--and not just "The Lottery."

"Charles" is a gem.

I finished Willy Vlautin, DON'T SKIP OUT ON ME. The story of good people in a hard world ends sadly. A very plainly written book - deliberately I assume. A kind of ingenuous quality, so the style can simply relay the naive protagonist's earnest questions and rebukes to himself. Easy to read. I'd tend to recommend it.

Reading Conrad always puts me back in sixth form, having to slog through Heart of Darkness, and I find myself repeating those patterns of stuckness and boredom. Yes, we get it Joe, everything is black. Even The Secret Sharer, which is very short, felt black-hole-dense and inesacapable.

(I don't get that feeling with Henry James, depsite an equally unpleasant freshman-year experience of Roderick Hudson.)

I read Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan. It's a short novel, almost entirely lacking in ornamentation, and uses the microcosm of a tiny border village to show the horrors of partition. I read it straight after Patricia Lockwood, which might explain why the lack of ornamentation was so pronounced, but there's also something about Singh's purpose and subject matter that renders anything figurative unnecessary or even offensive. That said, Singh is I think known for the plainness of his style and, as an editor of local stories gathered after partition, was renowned for his austere editing style.

Also this week, I was walking in the Mendips and took a detour down to East Coker to see Eliot's memorial in the church. I read Four Quartets in the churchyard, alongside a row of almshouses there, and was taken this time by how, underneath the deep meditations on time and purpose, conservative and nationalistic it is - particularly Little Gidding. 'Eliot in deeply conservative' shocker isn't a great revelation I know, and that particular poem was written when he was literally watching London burn, but still.

Now reading, as part of my project not to read any more farty old JB Priestley, Bright Day by JB Priestley. It's written at a similar time to Four Quartets (published in 1946) and takes a similar path to An Inspector Calls in casting an eye back to the golden age immediately preceding WWI - this time taking Priestley's growing up in Bradford as its subject matter. It's much kinder to that generation than AIC, and the clear difference is how he gives free rein to his Jungian preoccupations, frequently referencing the unconscious, magic and - less overtly - the role of archetypes in our lives. It's a bit plodding, tbh.

man, I wish I'd attended a school where Roderick Hudson was on the reading list.

I could make the case for Heart of Darkness, like Wharton's The House of Mirth, as worst introduction to a major novelist's work.

er, sorry, Ethan Frome.

I think I did Heart of Darkness at A-level. Certainly no Wharton.

Worth reading Chinua Achebe on Heart Of Darkness.

Yup.

Edward Said too.

And Sven Lindqvist.

Just about almost nearly finished Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, would recommend it for fans of her other work or of vast sprawling contemplative literary historical dramas.

Bridget Christie A Book For Her
Found this in a charity shop last week after having looked at it online a few months ago. Have enjoyed some of her standup before and panel show appearances.
So, just read the preface and first chapter of this and found it quite funny.
Surreal and realist and scatological (flatus is a word I've rarely heard on its own) and intelligent and childish and things.
Seem to be some overlap with some comedy of Stewart Lee who I think she's married to, so wonder if this reflects conversation topics between them.
Well enjoying it so far but I am reading a stack of books at teh same time.

Peter Barry Beginning Theory
coming to the end of the book in the beginning series dealing with Literary and Cultural theory. Think I may be looking into picking up some more of these if they turn up in charity shops. Possibly including later incarnations of this book since this is like 10 years old right now.
Interesting to see outlines of the forms of theory. Not sure how much of this I'm going to remember permanently. But good grounding I think. Will try to read some fo the books cited too.

Nelson Algren Never Come Morning
Book about various people of Polish American extraction etc living in Chicago in around teh turn of teh 40s. Algren apparently had some trouble with censorship at teh time. Nice gritty work though.
Mainly deals with a bunch of youth . One of whom is currently in a jail cell.

Imperium in Imperio Sutton Griggs
Turn of the 20th century speculative fiction about a brilliant black student and his activity post graduation. trying to work out how to describe this further without giving spoilers. Other than to refer to his rivalry with his onetime classmate.
THis was one of teh longer entries in the Black Science Fiction anthology put out by Flame Tree Publishing last year. I mainly got this for Pauline Hopkins book Of One Blood. Incidentally I've just heard she has a large entry in the new book Linernotes For A Revolution by Daphne Brooks. She was talking about that and other people she was writing about in the interview she did with Love Is The Message
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kWmdOjUGRdbdF22gBTdKT?si=526bb2e4a6304304
I managed to read almost all of this book over the last few months apart from Blake, or The Huts of America by Martin R. Delany which I think I'm going to skip since i need to return a book to get one I have on order out. May be something i will regret but it is late 19th century largely written in phonetic versions of imperfect English from enslaved characters and also is apparently not complete since no copies of the magazine that the concluding chapter was in could be found.
The rest is pretty good though and hopefully this being published will lead to more people looking into the area. & I hope a copy of this will turn up in a charity shop somewhere I can find it.

Mande Music Eric Charry
Ethnonusicologist's book on music from the Northwest of Africa . very good and deeply recommended.
I'm mainly reading through the Appendixes cos I've finsihed the main body of the text. Also need to write down the music and books cited

I finished The English Teacher. I must note that it is unusual among Narayan's books I've read in that the plot incorporates some strongly polemical elements, most prominently his beliefs about an afterlife. He tries to dispel one's doubts about his version of life after death simply by creating fictions that require them to be true. It's obvious he is sincere in his beliefs and means well.

On a whim, started The Martian, which has been sitting in my Kindle library forever. So far, it's . . . interesting, but plodding. Not sure how you can make the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars dull, but Weir is doing his level best. Not having seen the film, I have no idea how this comes out, and I'm willing to stick with it to see, but it's not exactly drawing me in.

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer L. Eberhardt - eye opening as these things usually are, entirely US centric unlike say Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez (not a criticism, just an observation). Leans very heavily on 'we took two dozen students and made them look at images of professional athletes and criminals while running on a treadmill and eating a sandwich' type research which, knowing about the replicability crisis in psychology, does make me slightly sceptical, unfairly or not. But also plenty of other statistical data, and hugely depressing stories of police racism and brutality, many of which were new to me, and other problems like innocent people systematically compelled into plea bargaining.

Also had one weird section where she describes going into a near panic attack when her husband hires a car on a caribbean island where - gasp - they drive on the other side of the road.

I read that a few months ago and thought it quite good. Seems to be being cited a lot since.
I then went and listened through a number of podcasts where she was guesting.
I think she is pretty interesting.
Also read Sway by Pragya Argawal and Corruptible by Brian Klaas around the same time. Thought they were all pretty good.
Will have a look at Invisible Women if I get teh chance.

I think that's my favourite of this genre, statistically heavy (not complicated, just lots of paragraphs with 'x% of women in y% of countries spend z% of their time doing v') but the most eye opening in terms of varieties of bias you might never have thought of before - e.g. gritting roads not pavements in winter prioritises commuters (typically male) not pedestrians and carers (more typically female); one study where they gritted pavements first found more savings from reduced pedestrian accidents than the extra cost.

gritting roads not pavements assume you mean gravel roads or any way something like that vs. pavements ok, but then what does they gritted pavements mean? Changing from pavement to gritted?

maybe you call it salt - putting stuff on the road (or pavement (i.e. sidewalk)) when it's icy to prevent or ameliorate ice & subsequent skidding & accidents.

Or in fewer words, de-icing.

I've been reading Ian Sansom, THE NORFOLK MYSTERY (2013), either side of a trip to Norfolk. The first volume in his series about 1930s popular writer Swanton Morley, it has the advantage of showing how the narrator first meets Morley and giving a lot of introductory material, etc - interesting to come at this having already read a later volume.

The Spanish Civil War background is stronger though fighting for the International Brigades is presented as a bad thing and a murderous folly. There is a curious political aspect to these books which seems to me a bit more reactionary than I had expected.

The book is if anything funnier than THE SUSSEX MURDER (which wasn't really about a murder), with some super set-piece dialogues in which Morley takes on an authority figure. In this book he is constantly reciting Latin phrases. I have no idea what any of them mean. Fortunately he usually then translates them, but not always. Sansom seems to have cut down the Latin later in the series, perhaps realising that most of us haven't a clue what it says.

I was standing at a University of East Anglia bus stop the other day and saw a bus headed for Swanton Morley, which was the first moment I was aware of the source of the character's name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanton_Morley

I just finished one of Ursula K. Le Guin's early novels, Planet of Exile. My relationship with her books is hard to explain, in that I find them well-written, evocative of the worlds they describe, thoughtful, carefully constructed, but not sterile. In short, I think they are good.

But I find I have to space my readings of her books well apart, because there is something about them which feels so consistently the same that I need to let the previous one fade out of memory or it feels like a repeat of the same book. I'm at a loss to say exactly what it is about her books that prompts this feeling. I just recognize its existence and can't locate the cause. So I wait a year or two between books.

About to start The Ides of March, Thornton Wilder's fictional autobiography of Julius Caesar. Because Our Town overshadows everything else, Wilder remains an unfairly neglected novelist.

Yeah, The New Yorker had an in-depth profile of him several years ago, with appealing takes on lesser-known works---what have you liked by him?

(Or in fewer words, de-icing. Should have gotten this from "winter," sorry.)

He understood American hucksterism. Try Heaven's My Destination and The Eighth Day, both released in paperback in the last two decades.

Rafia Zakaria The Upstairs Wife
book about family life in early 70s Pakistan. I think its like a family memoir . Mainly about life after partition and things. Quite interesting. I had enjoyed her book on White Feminism so wanted to read more. Would enjoy reading her book on The Veil too, but couldn't find it in the library system.

Salsa Sue Steward
erudite well written book on the South American music style(s). I've just begun it so she's talking about the history of how slavery was managed in Cuba which ceased to be as mixed as possible because counterproductive. Turned out that trying to prevent people from being with people of their own background to prevent attempts at uprising meant they felt really isolated and didn't work to their best. (Interesting like does that indicate they were like human and therefore maybe shouldn't be enslaved?) so the enslaved were regrouped along tribal lines or similar and given some access to music making and things. Helps make the work force a more productive one. & ensuing from this traditions were developed which later on become the basis of the popular sound.
Well looks like its a good book . Think I have seen it before so not sure why I haven't had it and read it._

In this book he is constantly reciting Latin phrases. I have no idea what any of them mean. Fortunately he usually then translates them, but not always. Sansom seems to have cut down the Latin later in the series, perhaps realising that most of us haven't a clue what it says.

I remember this happening a lot when I was reading Poe - not just latin either, but also French, Spanish, maybe German? Not entirely sure whether he assumed everyone reading would know these languages or whether he was just showing off.

But depending on Sansom's audience, most of his readers might have indeed understood latin? Was reminded by reading Molesworth that Latin used to be a basic element of a public school education.

Reading the first volume of James Kaplan's Sinatra biography. Front cover blurbs by the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal, as if to tell me that I must be a cunt if I'm interested in reading about Sinatra.

To clarify: Ian Sansom is a living writer and this book is from 2013, so it's not a matter of a historic readership.

Perhaps many of Poe's readers did indeed know multiple languages.

ah ok sorry didn't realise it was contemporary

Thought people did this as way of showing off their erudition or at least mock erudition. It was definitely done quite often back in the day.

I guess it can be done now as a way of harkening back to that old tradition.

Take a look at The Recognitions, for example. First two things you see are a quote in Latin and a quote in German from Faust.

I guess it can have a narrative function, as with films - the narrator hears people talking in a foreign language, but doesn't know what they're saying, and nor does the monolingual reader, thereby building suspense, or identification with the fictional protagonist.

There was supposedly a time when Every Schoolboy Knew Latin so there’s that as well. I never studied it, although I did click on the Duolingo course a few times, but I feel like if I stare at it long enough it starts to make sense. For instance, just went to a Clozemaster collection of Common Latin Phrases and seeing things like

De (et coloribus) non est disputandum.

What do you mean by that?

looks like there's a word missing to me (i did study latin, up to A-level, where i did very badly bcz i didn't do the revision lol)

the more common phrase is: de gustibus non est disputandum, concerning taste there is no argument (meaning there's no point arguing)

coloribus means colour

a better translation is "there's no argument against someone's tastes"

(not sure where colours come into it, apparently it was already a cliche in ancient rome and no one knows who said it first)

this guy has cut back on using latin apothegms bcz he's used all the ones he knows

Yes, the full quote was De gustibus (et coloribus) non est disputandum. Was trying to clean up some format and a very important word went missing.

Guess my point might have been that there are some Latin phrases and cliches that are pretty familiar even to the general public whereas others would be recognizable to those with an Old Skool education or playing catchup to such.

parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

"Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus," is now become a very vulgar saying. Every man and almost every boy for these seventeen hundred years has had it in his mouth. But it was at first spoken by the excellent Scipio, who was without question a most worthy, most happy, and the greatest of all mankind.

parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

Then there’s that one attributed to Galen that probably belongs on I Love TMI.

As Mark S said: I don't see where colour comes into it.

I don't know what your other Latin sentences mean.

this guy has cut back on using latin apothegms bcz he's used all the ones he knows

This is a good theory!

google translate is surprisingly good at a first rough aproximation!

= go to google, type in "latin english" (without the quotemarks): then drop the phrase you want to read into the "latin" space and a translation will apear in the "english" space -- tho it's sometimes a bit literal

Think the colour part is some interior decorating thing.

"You cannot argue with taste, but honey, that puce is just hideous."

Lol.

Most if not all of the Latin phrases mentioned so far you can just search the whole thing and find a translation, usually with commentary.

“This screensaver is killing me.”

There are probably over a hundred latin 'tags' so common across a fistful of european cultures that they're like the various taglines from Shakespeare known to most English speakers.

People in other European countries may know 100+ Latin phrases.

Having lived in England a long time, I would suggest that a majority of people in England do not.

James Redd: Yes, one can use Google Translate to translate phrases from foreign languages. This is often highly useful. But I didn't particularly want to be doing it twice per page while reading this novel (which I generally read away from a computer).

my ereader has French, Spanish and English dictionaries built in, which is handy when reading, say, Cormac McCarthy

i'm actually quite interested in which phrases have got bedded into which languages -- which of the following do the french or the dutch or the swedes also say?

status quo, de facto, persona non grata, bona fide, sui generis, sine qua non, ad infinitum, et cetera…

and what -- of similar ilk -- do they say that we don't?

googling says french also uses: ad hoc, vice versa, de jure/de facto and bona fide

Sorry about that, the pinefox. Believe it was sinkah who first mentioned Google Translate, I didn’t specify a particular search engine or software. Feel like this whole discussion is at risk of turning into a mise en abyme.

Wonder if someone can make a bad joke about a French band that is the equivalent of Status Quo.

my pitch for that band is little bob story

Ha, never even heard of them but they seem to fit the bill.

I guess it can have a narrative function, as with films - the narrator hears people talking in a foreign language, but doesn't know what they're saying, and nor does the monolingual reader, thereby building suspense, or identification with the fictional protagonist.

Wonder if someone can make a bad joke about a French band that is the equivalent of Status Quo.

Ça plane pour moi.

Pinefox, pinevixen

I looked up one of the first long Latin sentences at the beginning of that book and had a lot of fun doing so. Wonder if I should post my results here or start another thread or maybe just revive one of the three extant ones about Latin.

mihi labitur!

(technically belgian but)

ego rex lecti sum!

(i think this project deserves its own thread)

xpost my ereader has French, Spanish and English dictionaries built in, which is handy when reading, say, Cormac McCarthy What ereader is that, koogs? Does sound handy.

and German, Italian and Portuguese

it's a kobo. Clara hd, but the firmware is common to most of them.

you still have to look things up a word at a time but it'll give you the gist.

Okay, off we go: Qui prior egressus est, Iacobus Rufus erat: A thread for all things Latin

>>> I looked up one of the first long Latin sentences at the beginning of that book

Which book? Do you mean THE NORFOLK MYSTERY? I hope so.

I finished THE NORFOLK MYSTERY. The Latin phrases continued to the end, still often untranslated and not understood by me. I note that while this is broadly frustrating, it need not be all bad. There is something to be said for a varied linguistic texture, escaping monolingualism and encountering other languages, to be sure. Still, I'm not sure that dropping in endless phrases from a language that almost nobody knows is a very effective aesthetic strategy.

The main thing I add about this novel is that the series, THE COUNTY GUIDES, while at some level detective stories, seem only partially engaged with that generic project. There is a crime or a murder, it is solved, there are interviews of a sort (though these usually under the guise of research for the County Guides). But I don't think that this novel would fare very well by the rules of the Detection Club, as it doesn't really present coherent evidence or sufficient clues for the reader to solve the mystery before the detective does. Generically these are novels half-engaged in the detective genre, which are also historical novels (pastiche to a degree, also with in-jokes and things that mean more to later readers) and, in a relatively gentle way, comedy. Their other big feature is to contain tons of information; they are to a large extent a celebration of the multitudinous world of fact.

The Champs Elysees... It's like that pond a British novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered deposits, lie the echoes of the voices of every passerby who has daydreamed on its banks. The shimmering water preserves those echoes forever and, on quiet evenings, they all blend together.

This is from Flowers of Ruin by Patrick Modiano but do any of you know what British novelist he's on about?

(...if any - it would hardly be uncharacteristic if this just turned out to be an evocative reference to nothing)

I don't. I suppose it could be an evocative reference to nothing, or it could well be a genuine reference to a not very well known novel that not many of us have read or remember.

Nice image but it strikes me that passers by wouldn't be daydreaming on its banks and that people daydreaming on its banks would be doing so silently. (No idea either.)

i finally finished season of migration to the north. i'm a little flabbergasted tbh. it's hard to know what to say about it, other than i can't stop thinking about it. one thing is don't recall ever reading a novel so compelling.

I had never heard of that book until now. Sounds like an essential read.

it's wild. beautifully written. accomplishes this feat where it's "about colonialism" but winds so deep into it that the subject disperses into i don't even know what, a subterranean network of images and events? all of these different intractable relations.

William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Antonio Moresco - Distant Light
Juan Carlos Onetti - The Shipyard
Antonio Di Benedetto - The Silentiary

The Silentiary is the 3rd book of Di Benedetto's fiction to be translated alongisde Zama and a book of his short stories (Esther Allen is translating one more of his 'trilogy' which will come out next year). I loved Zama very much and this is probably even better. Di Benedetto might've sharpened his concision and directness just a touch, in this tale of a man's battle against man-made noise. The one review I've read (in the Nation) cites Kafka and Dostoevsky but the writing is very different, there isn't a battle against a bureaucracy (though his enemy cannot be fought against: you either endure or fall, and you can guess what happens). I finished it alongside a re-read of Onetti's Shipyard (also published in the early 60s) and this is Latin American literature at its best. The narrator goes back to the town he left long ago, he is offered to manage a Shipyard but its just a thread to hang the various torments of the mind which Onetti's prose takes you through. Both are short, intense, with Onetti having more 'plot', and if they are doing a sort of existential crisis I can tell you no one at that time was doing it better. A great time to be alive, it is not. For the reader, it is.

I also read Moresco's Distant Light, the only novel by this Italian writer to be translated (he apparently went onto write a Pynchon-y book that hasn't been translated yet), and this is like a well written episode of the X-Files. A man in a small town is walking about and finds a spot of Distant Light. Night after night, which he traces it all back to a child who is living on his own, is a good cook and goes to Night School. Its fun. Then onto another of Shakespeare's plays.

>> i finally finished season of migration to the north
> I had never heard of that book until now

me neither. but less than 3 hours later i was recycling old copies of the Guardian Review and someone mentioned it in her favourite books.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/22/leila-aboulela-books-that-made-me

Started In Dubious Battle, my first Steinbeck novel since high school.

Finished a few smaller things, also finished Prynne’s new Snooty Tip-Offs. Trying to decide whether to read poems or a novel next, think I might go with the latter and read Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli. Anyone read it?

Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water
Alice Oseman, Heartstopper (v1)
Emma Healey, Best Young Woman Job Book

Oh, I also began What Was I Thinking? by Jalal Toufic, but I am reading it slowly, section by section.

Just to get away from fiction for a bit, I've started reading a book on the influence of geography on geopolitics, Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall (2015). I picked it up on a whim for $3 at the charity shop. I know nothing about the British author, but I'm finding his tone somewhat annoyingly neo-con. He treats national leaders as if they are automatons programmed to obey some kind of national 'will to power', so instead of simply stating the strengths and weaknesses created by Russia's geography, Mr. Tim confidently asserts Putin has "no choice" but to control Ukraine.

However, after I filter out that sort of toxic nonsense, there is some interesting info in the book which I hadn't known or else hadn't considered from a geopolitical perspective. I'll probably stick with it and just hate the author as I do.

I can't help with the reference but have to concur (I think) that the images are striking. I've only read the three novellas that were published after the prize and remember the suitcase from the first and the coat worn indoors from the second, and those images make me want to revisit them.

Isaac Asimov: FOUNDATION & EMPIRE (1952).

The second in the FOUNDATION trilogy. I always thought this stuff would be vast and stodgy. It's actually a trio of relatively slim volumes, written in an SF magazine style that flies by. Once again we leap decades forward in time, and read of an encounter between the Foundation and the central Galactic Empire. It's getting more into space-opera vein than the first volume, less anthropological or sociological. A point that keeps occurring to me, which I may have said before, is: why does no one ever argue that STAR WARS was partly based on Asimov?

One other reflection: though Asimov is projecting far into the future, he remains rather liberal humanist. I mean: his future humanity continues to do things similar to what humans have historically done, up to c.1950. They govern, dominate, conquer or are ruled. They trade and seek financial advantage, and trade tends to develop civilization and contact. They form religions, as ways of assimilating things they don't understand. All this may be a very reasonable extrapolation. I just note how universalising it is as a projection of what humans have been like up to the 20th century.

In a way Asimov's galaxy curiously lacks alterity. The people are like us - though always with odd names (like Star Wars). There are no aliens yet (no spoilers if they turn up later). There are robots - but not in these books (I'm aware of how much and how well he writes on robots elsewhere).

It's all reassuringly enjoyable.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/118019

^ Asimov on Star Wars

fwiw i was disappointed in the Foundation trilogy having heard such good things about it beforehand. i will stick with the robot books.

Reading Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio HG. Quick and harrowing!

are you reading the italian?

(apologies for interrupting) I am reading A Promised Land by Barack Obama. I stopped in the middle several months ago and found it easy to pick up again. He is an engaging writer. Also, that there is a partially known ending to recent history gives it a storybook quality that is somewhat reassuring: for better or worse, the past is over and done.

Soldaten Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer
book based on a cache of tapes recorded of German Army POWS in WWII that were discovered decades later. Shows what the man in the street in German uniform actually thought, epistemology of an average person under that regime like. I was telling somebody about its existence over the weekend and realising i hadn't read it. I thought it was something important to be aware of so trying to get it read . But its my current bathroom book so not sure how long that will take.

Augusto Boal Games For Actors and non-Actors
radical theatre theorists book on methodology ,. He was applying the theory that Paulo Freire had been devising for education .
I can see where a tone deaf white priviliged idiot running a parochial local theatre group dedicated to his thought could go very wrong with trying to apply this especially if one is being extremely sdelf congratulatory about how one is doing so.
So while i think it is important material I also think one has to be careful how one does apply it and there has to be some basic thought always constant. One is not supposed to see oneself as being the all-knowing and I think the group I was in contact with who were supposedly applying it weren't very self reflexive. Just white liberal, arrogant and therefore not really applying this but a negative version of it. Bleurgh, Would love to find a group with a better handle on it, has left a very bad taste in my mouth .

mookie, I'm reading the new-ish translation on NYRB classics.

ah, cool -- i have a copy but haven't gotten around to it

I can't help with the reference but have to concur (I think) that the images are striking. I've only read the three novellas that were published after the prize and remember the suitcase from the first and the coat worn indoors from the second, and those images make me want to revisit them. What book is this?

SUSPENDED SENTENCES
Three Novellas
By Patrick Modiano
Translated by Mark Polizzotti
213 pp. Yale University Press. Paper, $16.

the reference in question being the memory pond thing Tim was asking about upthread

Suspended Sentences is the source of the passage I was asking about.

the wild shore - kim stanley robinson, felt like minor KSR. less interested in the stuff he's good at (wonky politics stuff) and more interested in the stuff he's bad at (characters)

the little drummer girl - le carre - extremely minor le carre! hearing tradecraft described at great length and in punishing detail is boring. still had the odd magical description though.

small things like these - claire keegan - extremely well done domestic novella about abuses by the irish church

the verge - patrick wyman - made insufficient effort to write and arrange ideas in a more booklike way than he does for his podcast, and as such pretty hard going

crying in h mart - michelle zahner - made a huge impact on my wife, and i can see why, but ehhh.

small town in germany - le carre - absolute banger

cormac mccarthy - child of god - short and incredibly bleak.

this is how they tell me the world ends - nicole perlroth - well-reviewed book about the history of infosec/cyber. extremely and credulously pro USA. says things like "Atkins was something of an anomaly among the mostly male, testosterone fueled coders she managed. Most had a deep distaste for authority. They buried their heads in code by day, and lived vicariously through virtual role playing games by night", despite being written recently, not in 1990.

patrick o'brian - post captain - reread. absolute banger.

arthur c. clarke - rendezvous with rama - meh

toni morisson - sula - very good! (also short)

invisible bridge - rick perlstein - the watergate stuff was great, but the second half (ford and ford vs jimmy carter) was a bit of a slog.

well-reviewed book about the history of infosec/cyber. extremely and credulously pro USA. How do these go together? How does her description about resentful testosterone heads buried in code fit 1990 but not today? Haven't read it but now curious.

it's extremely Voice of the Reasonable New York Times in its politics, and the description of hacker culture rings false throughout. the example line is like a line from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine (1981) or from a local news piece about surfing the internet ca. 1999.

(soul of a new machine is a great book, btw, highly recommended, but it's also 40 years old, and i wouldn't expect it to describe google engineers ca. 2020 accurately)

the little drummer girl - le carre - extremely minor le carre! hearing tradecraft described at great length and in punishing detail is boring. still had the odd magical description though.

Yeah that was a slog. Read it in anticipation of the Park Chan-wook miniseries (one of my fave directors) and by the time I'd finished it I couldn't bother to watch the show.

I watched the TV programme of that novel and didn't greatly enjoy it. The one positive was the use of the Institute of Education, Bloomsbury, as a setting.

i finally finished season of migration to the north. i'm a little flabbergasted tbh. it's hard to know what to say about it, other than i can't stop thinking about it. one thing is don't recall ever reading a novel so compelling.

― the cat needs to start paying for its own cbd (map), Friday, April 29, 2022 3:41 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

yaaaaaay i love this book! i teach it every year and this year my students did not love it, so i am extra-glad you did. it rules.

Read it in anticipation of the Park Chan-wook miniseries (one of my fave directors) and by the time I'd finished it I couldn't bother to watch the show.

haha yes me too!

it's extremely Voice of the Reasonable New York Times in its politics, in what respect? Examples? Also, how has code head culture changed so much? Less male-dominated and/or better attitude? Hope so, but haven't heard that.

the author presumes good faith and good intent from all US govt sources throughout, and seems like a bit of a mark for russiagate related conspiracies.

the sentence i quote is just lazy facile superficial cliched writing about tech. it's such bad writing that i wrote it down. there's a kernel of truth here in the way lazy facile superficial cliches often have a kernel of truth. (except "testosterone fueled", which does not mean male-dominated in common usage and seems like an editing mistake tbh.) but it's a book about the culture of the infosec community, so you might expect it to contain richer and subtler ideas than the evening news.

best guess at the meaning of code head culture: has trimmed beard spends more time on facial hair than code uses words like gnarly wears black long sleeve t-shirts
best case image of code head culture: writes clean code understandable by anyone and with expertise according to constraints that take into account those served and the culture itself

(deeply regret the implicit assumption (viz. facial hair) that the term applies to males)

the culture itself meaning what counts among savants of the culture according to existing constraints

security seems to have traditionally been ranked low in the hierarchy that exists within this amorphous culture (viz. the respect shown sys admins ... I don't think the culture includes mathematicians ... )

Things I have been reading, an inconclusive list:

NANA - Ai Yazawa.

I don’t really read much manga in general but I loved Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss which a good friend recommended me and have been reading the back volumes of Nana on and off for a few months. (There’s a lot of it!) Two young women, both called Nana, meet and end up as housemates in Tokyo. Nana K is sensitive, flighty and vaguely ridiculous; Nana O is a tough no-nonsense type who is a talented singer who dreams of stardom. Despite this cliché beginning, the story expands and unfurls and grows. More characters, more tiny events that build the picture piece by piece. I’ve never cared for the art style much but it’s useful in illustrating the many expressions in this story. And I love her lineart and detailing. The story, of the particularly intense relationships you form in your early twenties (and particularly those with other women) is familiar and sad and I read like five chapters every time and I still leave gaps cos in the back of my mind I’m aware that it’s been on hiatus since 2009. Anyway, love this very much.

The Club & People Like Her - both Ellery Lloyd

From time to time I like to read some trash, ok, basically most of the time. These two novels are both by the same husband and wife couple and one is about a thinly veiled Soho House murder mystery (I loved this a lot and read it all in an evening) and the other is the story of an influencer with a murderous stalker. The characters are sketched - this is very much plot driven work from start to finish - but that’s fine, and I found them both very easy to read and a good palate cleanser. Strongly recommend for travel reading.

Red as Blood - Tanith Lee

I’ve read these before but they are still fantastic reading - Lee’s retelling of classic fairy tales across the ages and genres is great and can always snap me out of any lull. Like all the good retellings, Lee leans on the creepiest elements of the original stories - the Pied Piper taking all the children, princesses being dispatched to new lands with their husbands that they barely know, what it means to sleep for a century. Anyway, strongly recommend this collection as always, the reissued cover is fucking appalling and gives you zero indication of the quality of the stories.

Cool, can always use more variety around here, and thanks for reminder for me to check Tanith Lee---btw, was thinking that the xpost Brad Watson novel Miss Jane is a happy example of male author writing from POV of female central character (also does some of that with other characters, including men), good for your thread about that.

xpost "testosterone fueled", which does not mean male-dominated in common usage and seems like an editing mistake tbh.) Seems like it pretty much is assumed to mean that, at least in American common usage.

I love Nana also. What I know about manga you could write out twice on the back of a postage stamp but Martin Skidmore wrote about it here: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2010/02/comics-a-beginners-guide-girls-comics/ and I bought in. The hiatus hadn’t lasted long when I was ripping through it, I had every expectation of new issues emerging :(

I miss Martin Skidmore too. Quite often things crop up I wish I could ask him about. Information I can get elsewhere but I miss his taste and the pleasure of having him tell me about stuff.

Oh Tim, thank you for this link, and I love that you love it also. I never knew MS but he seemed a nice sort from what everyone says about him.

I feel as if I could happily watch them together in their flat, at the table in the bay window, forever.

Go Went Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck. Not sure where it's going but already feel gently scolded for my comfortable life.

I don't know much about manga either -- this podcast has been fun to dip into and is relatively podcast-banter-free: https://www.mangasplaining.com.

Ah, I listened to the episode on there about Helter Skelter, and it was great! I learned a lot about it, like the fact that the nudity was hugely controversial in Japan (and some of it was technically illegal, being uncensored where it normally would be iirc?!) It still won awards in Japan though, so that clearly didn’t matter much. I thought of this before the last ILB FAP actually beside I went to the Courthauld beforehand and was reading notes on paintings about controversial nudity - anyway, can second the recommendation based on the one episode I listened to and recommend Kyoko Okazaki always, ofc.

I'll check that episode out!

Unrelatedly I believe one of the hosts, Chris, was the model for Wallace in Scott Pilgrim

read THE CARTOGRAPHERS by peng shepherd. fucking awful

its central conceit, which apparently some reviewer called 'borgesian', is obvious and trite. every plot point is both telegraphed and then beaten into the ground just in case we missed it. the characters act in completely absurd ways and the plot ultimately makes no sense

worst novel i've read in years, which is the kind of shit that happens when one is up all night

Chip Zdarsky on this episode illustrates Sex Criminals, which I really like (and am behind on). I really enjoyed listening to him talk about the art.

mookieproof have u considered reading nhl fic josei manga

I couldn't help wanting to read a sample of The Cartographer's after your post, and it definitely has a touch of the Lanchester about it

yaaaaaay i love this book! i teach it every year and this year my students did not love it, so i am extra-glad you did. it rules.

― horseshoe, Monday, May 2, 2022 2:40 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i picked it up in no small part because of your touting it in these threads, so thank you.

paul takes the form of a mortal girl by andrea lawlor

have any of y'all read this? it's a fucking delight. highly recommended if you've ever been gay in college

Finished Morselli’s Dissipatio HG. Glad to have read it, tho somewhat unsatisfied with it— I felt like the lushness of the narrator’s interior landscape was occasionally cracked by his reverence and love for the natural world, but the descriptions of the latter felt piddling in spite of his abstracted, almost anarcho-primitivist reactionary belief system.

One thing that was interesting for me was that the style of interior monologue reminded me a bit of Christa Wolf’s work, particularly in Accident and No Place on Earth.

Not sure what’s next, have a few different options, but might go with another novel— not sure why I’m feeling novels this spring, but I am.

One thing I remark about Asimov's FOUNDATION & EMPIRE: I hazarded, on no evidence, that future work might just contain some women characters, and indeed this one does - a woman called Bayta, who has a degree of strength and independence* though is still sometimes referred to as focusing on 'fripperies' like serving dinner while a war's on.

*these may sound like poor criteria for judging women characters but I remind the reader that vol 1 only contained one woman character, a surly wife, who appeared twice in 230pp.

Leaving aside the above point, I'm not sure I'm enjoying this volume as much as the first, because of the way the plot has turned halfway through towards yet another war, this time with a seemingly indestructible foe. But 50pp to go.

Will Sergeant Bunnyman
Just read the first couple of chapters so he's still a young child i think. He's gone to school and things but not got much further than that.
I just listened to his appearance on Curious Creatures the podcast done by Lol Tolhurst and Budgie which seems to be a good one.

The music of Africa J. H. Kwabena Nketia,
not really started this yet but got it from the library yesterday. 1974 book on African music and its history. Should be good, I think i had it recommended or at least cited by Paul Gilroy.

Soldaten Sonke Neitzeld and harald Welzer
Just been reading some tales told by captured Luftwaffe pilots about how they enjoyed shooting bullets at people . & targeting ships and things. The writers/editors have compared their descriptions as analogous to video game players. With a similar level of dismissal of collateral damage, like it has no effect on them and is actually something they enjoy doing. I think this book probably gets a lot more scary, examples given in the introduction would certainly suggest so.

I finished FOUNDATION & EMPIRE. I don't like the turn that this book takes c. halfway through, and don't feel greatly encouraged about reading Vol 3, but have started that already and will get through it.

Part of my reason for dislike is something that will sound deeply old-fashioned or unsophisticated, at best, to most. That is, I felt that this SF novel veered off track through factors that weren't really 'SF' or 'scientific' enough. A 'mutant' takes over the galaxy due to his unique powers of mind control. But there is no explanation of who 'mutants' are, why they arise, or why this particular mental capacity would emerge (in just one being in the galaxy?). We're in superhero territory at best. The effect is somewhat like 'magic', and thus, to me, a somewhat unhappy blend of 'SF' and 'fantasy'.

This view, I again realise, will not be respected by many readers, including SF experts, but it is part of my intuitive response to this book. I think this response is actually analogous to the old Detection Club rule that mysteries should never have supernatural solutions. This demonstrates the tendency of SF and detection to share 'cognitive' (Suvin) bases, though in reality I am aware that large amounts of SF do not, and most of the science in SF is, almost by definition, speculative or imaginary.

One more notable feature: after all my complaints about the extreme lack of women in these books, the one I mentioned, Bayta, actually turned out to be a heroine who was the strongest, most independent figure and took the final decisive action. A considerable turnaround by Asimov's standards.

Pinefox, I'm slightly surprised you haven't really said anything about Asimov's actual prose style ...

so bad it's not even prose iirc

Heh. Lots of dull exposition and drab dialogue punctured by plenty of sf-style minced oaths iirc. I believe Martin had something to say about this on more than one occasion.

Think I meant to say punctuated by but punctured kind of works too I guess.

Destroy Asimov (worst prose in SF, which is going some), Doc Smith (unless you are under 14).

― Martin Skidmore, Thursday, 16 May 2002 00:00 (nineteen years ago) link

You don’t need to read this whole thing, since I excepted this best part for you.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/244773/why-does-the-protagonist-of-asimovs-caves-of-steel-exclaim-jehoshaphat-inste

You might wish to note that this is a technique frequently used by Asimov. Specific examples include;

The Foundation Trilogy:- "Space!", "By Space!" "Great Space!", "Good Galaxy!", "By the Galaxy!", "He went space knows where" in place of "God"
End of Eternity: "Time!" or "By Time!" in place of "God"
Reason (Robot Short Story) - "“Oh, Jupiter, a robot Descartes." in place of "Jesus",
etc

The 'Galaxy!' stuff doesn't work well for me, but I love the way that the two astronauts in I, ROBOT say 'Sizzling Saturn !!'.

A character in FOUNDATION & EMPIRE repeatedly uses the word 'unprintable' in place of an expletive.

I would say that the FOUNDATION books are workmanlike as narrative, sometimes clumsy or awkward, very occasionally and tenuously reaching for something more lyrical (about space). But I, ROBOT is better: clear, crisp, functional, rational, getting complex ethical dilemmas and the like across.

Also true that in FOUNDATION there is much bad expository dialogue ie: a character summarises something and the other character says "This is well understood. What of it? Go on!"

im also going to start saying that

great space! this is well understood. what of it? go on!

almost like it's well understood but go on king I guess

By Hammer Time!

By Space Ghost!

By Spacely’s Sprocket!

The effect is somewhat like 'magic'

any sufficiently advanced technology etc etc, which iirc was pointed out in the first book

i agree that the mule’s advent doesn’t bear too much scrutiny, but of course the story is much less about him than how The Plan will respond to him. (that doesn’t bear much scrutiny either tbh, but disbelief has to be suspended somewhere)

Thought that saying was attributed to ACC, iirc.

Anyone read Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor? Just picked it up for my wife and I'm wondering if it's too bleak for her

xp it is

Prose Stylist

Some famous terrible prose writers: Isaac Asimov is unspeakably bad, tin-eared and clumsy and ugly. I love Dick (haha yes okay), but he's sometimes bad. Sinclair Lewis was stiff and dull, but not as rotten as Dreiser. Barbara Cartland is much worse than you even imagine she would be.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Sunday, 8 September 2002 20:36 (nineteen years ago)

Whole posts is worth reading though, since he also says who he thinks is good.

posts

Any discussion of Bad Writing increases the already high incidence of typos for some unknownobvious reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzlK0OGpIRs

I would say that the FOUNDATION books are workmanlike as narrative, sometimes clumsy or awkward, very occasionally and tenuously reaching for something more lyrical (about space). But I, ROBOT is better: clear, crisp, functional, rational, getting complex ethical dilemmas and the like across.

No prob w Dreiser's prose in the Library of America omnibus of Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and 12 Men. Haven't read any more of him, and maybe I hit it lucky/am too permissive. No problem with PKD either, though I've read a lot more of his.

Think I pretty much enjoyed the trilogy when I was 10, incl. not feeling in awe of/intimidated by the grown-up's prose. Pretty sure he was trying to please my demographic (I was mostly reading comics at the time), and all that "By the Galaxy!"" was part of it, even though I could read "son of a bitch!" and "Tell him to get his ass down here" in Galaxy magazine, in gen. audience contexts usually not too hard for 10-year-old mind to grok.

The Golden Age of By Galaxy Time is ten.

pinefox: i was happy to read your thoughts on the foundation series -- i'm still a great fan of the original three books, despite their flaws. i don't mind the clunky dialogue (someone on ilx once suggested that all the characters talked a little bit like mr burns), and i honestly don't remember the descriptive writing being too bad (plain and non-flashy, certainly).

iirc, asimov wrote the later novels at his publisher's urging, and i struggle to remember much about them. he seems to have lost interest in fiction in the mid-50s and spent most of the rest of his career writing, well, every other type of book: limerick collections, autobiographies (at least three of these), an annotated gilbert and sullivan. if halley's comet was due to return, you could bet there would be a book out that year called "ASIMOV'S GUIDE TO HALLEY'S COMET." (that very book has been at the used bookstore down the street for years, but i've resisted the urge to buy it so far.) apparently one of his goals was to get at least one book in every category of the dewey decimal system.

Whole posts is worth reading though, since he also says who he thinks is good.

I finished Prisoners of Geography, which had a few good points about it, but the less said about it the better.

I am now reading a pop history of the US Dust Bowl in the 1930s, The Worst Hard Times, Timothy Egan. As popular history it is exemplary. Egan finds and tells the stories of individuals, families and various small towns which lends human scale and emotional resonance to the history he wants to convey, then surrounds these small scale stories with the larger context of US homesteading, WWI, frontier capitalism, the mechanization of farming, and patterns of immigration. He also writes very 'punchy' prose without getting too gaudy to be readable. It works the way it is designed to work and delivers a large amount of information in a painless, engaging fashion.

this list he posts of good stylists is senior year of high school type stuff, not terribly interesting imho. also all men .

I don’t object to authors being problematic, I just object to a list of dead white dudes who are part of an English language canon (and have been for 50+ years in some cases) being construed as interesting when it comes to style. I agree with his choices, but just don’t think they’re very interesting ones! Not trying to pick on you, I am just a little confused by what you wrote.

tbh I really only care that the dead white dude, whose taste in sf was always interesting to me, posted about M. John Harrison, who is still around and still a dude but maybe can still write too. But yeah, looking at the list again, your point is fair enough.

I don’t object to authors being problematic, I just object to a list of dead white dudes who are part of an English language canon (and have been for 50+ years in some cases) being construed as interesting when it comes to style. I agree with his choices, but just don’t think they’re very interesting ones! Not trying to pick on you, I am just a little confused by what you wrote.

_I don’t object to authors being problematic, I just object to a list of dead white dudes who are part of an English language canon (and have been for 50+ years in some cases) being construed as interesting when it comes to style. I agree with his choices, but just don’t think they’re very interesting ones! Not trying to pick on you, I am just a little confused by what you wrote._


tbf this post from twenty years ago is more about addressing the topic of that thread than it is about coming up with an “interesting” list of names of authors

The post, not the list, was construed as “worth reading” because it mentioned good prose as well as bad

Citing Wodehouse as an example of good prose is no more interesting than citing Asimov as an example of bad, I agree, I just think you’ve focused on the wrong part unless you are just heavily invested in the interestingness of citations of authors

I finished Jenny Erpenbeck's 'Go, Went, Gone'. Really, depressingly good on the refugee situation in Europe, and as I said above good at making one feel guilty for one's comfortable life. Hugely and rightfully scornful of the enormous abrogation of responsibility that is the Dublin regulation. Very simple prose that occasionally startles you with an image e.g. 'For a moment, this thought opens its jaws wide, displaying its frightening teeth'.

Now started Lethem's 'Gun, with Occasional Music'. I wasn't expected such a brazen Chandler pastiche, will see if it overstays its welcome - it's fairly short at least.

It's still as good as almost any book he's written.

Finsihed Will Sargent's Bunnyman which has me hoping he gets the 2nd volume finished soon. He stops just after De Freitas has been recruited though not sure how taht works if he was still aschoolfriend of a friend in a Somerset boarding school. Though since everybody else is like 19 or 20 maybe this wasa couple of years after taht anyway.
Really enjoyed this. So do definitely want more.
I caught teh City Lights webinar book launch thing of this and Bobby Gillespie's memoir and wonder if that is remotely worth a look.
Like only reading about 15 books already.

Think I will have the combined bio of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Miles Davis by the end of this week. Have already read a lot about Miles and far less about the other 2.

A combined bio of those three? What book is that?

Miles, Ornette, Cecil : how Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized the world of jazz / Howard Mandel.
ISBN:
9780415967143 ((hbk.)(hbk.) :)0415967147 ((hbk.) :)

Forgot about that book.

Holy shit that Mandel book costs a fortune! Was hoping I could find a cheap copy somehow.

Can you really accept this guy as an authority on jazz?

https://e.snmc.io/i/600/s/12938adddf5d9510964c642ea31bece4/2115107/howie-mandel-fits-like-a-glove-Cover-Art.jpg

Lol. wrong thread maybe.

Stevo, have you read A.B. Spellman's Four Lives In The Be-Bop Business? Early scuffling years of Ornette, Jackie Maclean (still young, still in with the bop crowd, but emerging from long heroin detour), eternal outlier Herbie Nichols (already dead in'63, but with, to this day, still-underexposed, still striking music), Cecil Taylor, still scuffling as of this book's publication in 1966---from the NYTimes review then, not paywalled:

Spellman steers clear of the misty romanticism that often colors writing about the struggles of jazz musicians. He views these men with a perceptive and understanding eye, digging through the protective surfaces and telling much of their stories in skillfully edited direct quotations that have the ring and bite of reality.

His place on Taylor is a particularly provocative portrait of a thorny, adamant and penetrating individual with a delightfully mordant wit. It sums up much of the essence of the book. It is Taylor who provides Spellman with a microcosm of the endless, Job-like adversities that can follow an innovator through the contemporary jazz world. And it is Taylor's thoughtful analysis of the relation of European music to the cultural aspirations of the white American and the black American that clarifies not only for justification for "serious jazz" as opposed to jazz as entertainment but also the underlying reasons why he and other likeminded musicians persist in the face of alienation and frustration that are their steady lot.

30pp into Asimov's SECOND FOUNDATION (1953). Having been disillusioned with the tiresome Mule story in vol 2, and not keen on this character's domination at the start of vol 3, I'm nonetheless encouraged. Two space captains set off in search of the Second Foundation, in what feels rather like a malign and cold version of Lando & Chewbacca's search for Han Solo. Adventure and intrigue seem to await. The nature of the Second Foundation remains, at this stage, quite mysterious (no spoilers please).

Separately I've been been going back to Ted Hughes - not his own poetry, but critical work, notably Paul Bentley's socialist interpretation TED HUGHES, CLASS & VIOLENCE (2014), which can be compelling to read but which I also gradually realise is fanciful and strained. The CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO TED HUGHES (2011) is of some use. The LETTERS OF TED HUGHES (2007) seem more remarkable, in the way that only letters can be. Also dipped into Jonathan Bate's TED HUGHES: THE UNAUTHORISED LIFE (2015).

I was particularly seeking evidence of TH's political views in later years and these seem to be more interesting and mixed than I'd expected. He quite often fires off moments of disdain for the influence of Conservatism in Britain. On the other hand I suspect any sustained comment on the political Left would be equally negative.

I haven't read the Spellman no. Not sure what I've read on Taylor or Coleman outside of music press. Are they in As Serious As Your Life and the Freedom Principle? That may be it if so.

Rereading Franny and Zooey the first time since I was 16. Probably holds up better than any other loved object of teenagerdom that I’ve revisited.

He feels astonishingly modern on young men and why they’re awful

I read it a few months ago for the first time -- otm

I've had a run of film-related stuff. Finished William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade which goes from funny and scurrilous into something approaching transcendent in the final third. It certainly functions as well as any other 'how to write good' book I've read.

A couple of BFI books: Yvonne Tasker on Silence of the Lambs, which didn't seem to say very much at all; David Thomson on The Big Sleep, which didn't really say a huge amount either but I could read Thomson all day so.

Now reading Otto Friedrich's City of Nets about Hollywood in the 40s.

janet malcolm wrote a great essay on franny and zooey (and how reviewers generally misunderstood it at the time) that’s well worth reading

xpost Chinaski, you might enjoy Robert Gottleib's bio-anthology Garbo, which I carried on about upthread, and Alfred said he loved it too. Incl. an otm James Harvey excerpt, so I'm going to check out JH's Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar
Yeah, I read Franny and Zooey in high school too, took it as, "Hang on to your dreams, kids, but don't end up like Holden!" He had followers by then---not yet Mark David Chapman, but was prob getting a bit alarmed. So, "Zooey" 's big brother lectures were understandable, esp. after Seymour's demise, but still I got a bit tired of them, though I thought of "Franny" as killer finale downtempo bonus track for Nine Stories, the high school fave that still plays in my head, maybe esp. the voice on the telephone at the wrong time, dead tired, but "rudely, almost obscenely quickened for the occasion." I know that voice.

Yep! It inspired me to read it xpost

Thanks for the Malcolm tip-off, that sounds fun - is there a free version online? (Unless I'm missing something)

If you can: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/06/21/justice-jd-salinger/

Aha - just being dozy and missed the "view this article if you register" smallprint - thanks!

"The 'mistakes' and 'excesses' that early critics complain of are often precisely the innovations that have given the work its power."

Love this so far

"The 'mistakes' and 'excesses' that early critics complain of are often precisely the innovations that have given the work its power."

think that applies to Hanya Yanigahara, but I know a lot of you hate her writing and I respect that

most recent for me

Colm Tóibín - The Magician
Anthony Doerr - Cloud Cuckoo Land
Jonathan Lee - The Great Mistake
Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You
Thomas Grattan - The Near East
R.O. Kwon - The Incendiaries
Damon Galgut - The Promise

Returned briefly to Sean O'Brien, THE DEREGULATED MUSE (1998) and read the essay on Hughes. Eloquent and agreeable. Very brief, though he plainly knows Hughes' work so well. Funny emphasis on the Laureate poems, which happen to be the one collection I've read in full.

Colm Tóibín - The Magician

Thoughts?

I liked it, it was entertaining and informative, but it seemed like a biography more than a work of fiction

I recently read Buddenbrooks, an amazing novel, it was hard to compare the two

Soldaten Sonke Neitzel & Harald Welzer
A cache of recordings of WWII German POWs casual conversation was found and transcribed after the war . This book is based on compiling and annotating those transcriptions the contents are far from pleasant. They show the epistemology of the average German soldier at the time. Their indifference or possibly numbness to killing both uniformed enemy and civilians. their attitude to what they perceived as the jewish problem, like it is universally accepted as something they need to deal with. Quite harrowing reading that this is what a group of people can believe through peer pressure and whatever other influences. & wondering how different it is to what some elements feel today.
I picked this up from a charity shop by chance and had taken in what the subject matter was etc. It was sitting in a pile of books to read when I pointed out its existence to somebody dealing with some things in the area as in perpetrator trauma and other forms of PTSD and related trauma. I thought I should get the book read as soon as possible. I currently have it as my bathroom book. So its being read slowly. I wonder if reading faster would be less traumatic.

Harlots, whores & hackabouts : a history of sex for sale Kate Lister
Recent book on the history of sex work and what that entails and its various understandings and motivations. I think it is right across recorded time which makes things possibly more interesting. I know she refers to Gilgamesh though it may be more tied into its Victorian era translation and the prudish reaction of the main translator George Smith to the section where the wildman Ekidu is tamed by the priestess of Ishtar. I heard taht bit during a book launch tie in webinar a few weeks ago so need to read the book to know more. I've so far read the introduction since i just got this from the library yesterday. I went out last night so wasn't reading then and woke up late so wasn't reading as much as i normally do. Did see images of icons of Ishtar depicted though.
I think I'm not that hot on the font being used in the book though, think I'm seeing letters morph which isn't very handy. Don't think I get that with more solid fonts. Oversize book with 2 columns of lightweight font. Like what's the opposite of bold?

Miles, Ornette, Cecil : how Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor revolutionized the world of jazz Howard Mandel
Canadian jazz critic writes an overview/short history of 3 majorly influential jazz artists. Again I've opnly read the introduction.
So looking forward to getting into this.

Have a bunch of other books out that I need to get further into.
Nelson Algren Never Come Morning
well written 1942 novel set in a largely Polish American section of Chicago. I should really have this done by now. IT is a good book I'm just reading a load of different things at the same time.

Eric Charry Mande Music
Good Ethnomusicological study of a North West African Music i really enjoy and still need to know more about. Like reading this and knowing all the music talked about are 2 different things.
I'm currently copying the discography out to RYM so I can check it out after returning the book . Am getting to hear single tracks from Spotify from the discs listed. Hopefully this will be helpful to others too.
But unfortunately not everything is in the RYM database and omigod could do with the search engine being more specific.

stacks of bell hooks, working my way through everything in the Irish library system though do wish there was more. I find her an easy read but may need to revisit quite heavily.

& still buying books from charity shops and have 12 books out of the library.
At some point I will like DEFINITELY read every book I have at hand .

Finished Gun, with Occasional Music. I dunno. He can clearly write, even a Chandler pastiche demonstrates that. But the SF aspect seemed mostly done for effect and I didn't really care for the whodunnit, the protagonists were all unlikeable and I guessed half of the twist. And to borrow a phrase from Tom Paulin, it was like reading a jockstrap. I'd like to know what else he can do but so many books, so little time.

I read As She Climbed Across the Table and found it the most difficult short book I've ever read, and never been tempted to go back to him.

Ducks, Newburyport - I'm about a quarter of the way in and it's skipping by. I wish I were on a sunlounger by a swimmingpool so I could race through it undisturbed in a few days. The witer I'm reminded of most is Anne Tyler.

I'm finally reading Thomas Ligotti, the Penguin edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe.

It is so much fun. I've been staying up 'til 1 am every night just to finish one more story.

Manuel Rivas - The Carpenter's Pencil
Volker Ullrich - Hitler: Volume II: Downfall 1939-45

Abandoned Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour halfway through. Actually enjoyed the first section which seemed grounded and captured something of how small but good life could feel before the internet. But it started unravel when she starts writing about the protagonist’s dead father’s spirit being “ejaculated” (her phrasing, uses it several times) into her body just after his death. And then a whole section where the protagonist turns into a leaf. Yes, a leaf. Awful.

I think every Lethem novel up to, say, 2007 is very good or very interesting.

I finished Asimov's SECOND FOUNDATION, and thus the FOUNDATION TRILOGY (1951-3). It makes a change for me to get through a major trilogy in a month, though it could be said that these books are not very long and are mostly quick to read.

The Hard SF element increases - more about Galactic navigation and about brain scans - though at the same time, the science increasingly becomes fantastically neurological or, in effect, about telepathy, and thus perhaps not so 'hard' after all. Unsure whether this is a good development but it's central to the direction of the trilogy.

Curiously there is an aspect of 'detection' to the whole story, viz 'where is the Second Foundation?' with a late scene in which one character after another puts forward a theory. Asimov did write a lot of detective fiction and I think the rationalism of that genre crosses that of his SF.

The 'gender representation' aspect improves: the granddaughter of the heroine of vol II is a major protagonist in vol III. This lets Asimov play out some very awkward bobby-soxxer domestic comedy material (these things seem unchanged, 50,000 years in the future, from the early 1950s), but overall he does at least show himself able to imagine women (and girls) doing things, which is a change from vol I.

The entire scheme and outcome would seem to be shadowed by a kind of moral question, basically: what are the ethics of a scenario in which protagonists are not acting on free will but actually directed by others' telepathic powers? Curiously this isn't really raised as an ethical question, though 'the free will to make our own mistakes' vs 'lack of free will achieves perfection' would seem to be the kind of ethical dilemma that Asimov could trundle around in a dialogue for many pages. There is thus arguably something sinister about this happy ending.

Asimov wrote 4 more novels from 1982 to 1993. I'm interested in these but don't think I should feel compelled to read them given that the trilogy was left complete for 30 years. The Asimov I would most like to read next is THE CAVES OF STEEL.

I will complete this post by coming full circle and noting that Arcadia's experience of dislocation and yearning among the ruins of Trantor, quite late in Vol III, seems one of many precursors to that of Pella Marsh on the Planet of the Archbuilders in Lethem's GIRL IN LANDSCAPE (1998).

Rereading Pere Goriot for the first time in 30 years.

Finished some chapbooks, and in my covid convalescing, also finished Emily Abendroth’s large book, Sousveillance Pageant. It is composed of interconnected chapters that are more like lyric essays, relating to surveillance culture, carceral systems, capture, and the way bodies are interpellated by these systems. Moving and infuriating in parts, particularly when relating the protagonist’s relationship with her incarcerated brother, and very funny in parts, too. Recommended for those interested in those subjects.

Started Kornbluth & Pohl, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (c.1953). A nice old pulpy (1960s?) edition. First impression: a SF-nal MAN MEN from the early 1950s? Sounds good.

Rereading Pere Goriot for the first time in 30 years.

I just read this for the first time last year. What struck me most was the amount of time it took him to die.

I finished The Worst Hard Time. I toyed with the idea of making a pun on 'harrowing' but nothing clever enough came to me. Also, as a book, it was quite harrowing in the emotional sense. Goddamn it's one ugly piece of history.

I think my next will be Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata, which I just brought home from the public library along with four other titles. Between those and unread books I own it's nice to have lots of options.

Reading Stacy Szymaszek’s The Pasolini Book and just ordered the new Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which I shouldn’t have done since I don’t have much dough at the moment, but oh well.

I finished "My Struggle Book 4" by Knausgaard, so only 2 more to go for me in that series. I guess I buy the hype. I find them very rich and compelling. Its probably a good thing he saved the material in this book for the 4th volume, because I don't think he would have gotten such favorable attention if he had started with this one. It covers just one year, more or less: the year after graduating high school when he was working a teacher in a junior high in northern Norway. There is less of a distancing perspective to give us a respite from the company of the protagonist, and the protagonist of this section is not very likeable: a reckless binge drinker, humorless, sex-obsessed, and with the brittle defiant pride of a young man with something to prove. Scarcely a female character is introduced without describing her physical characteristics in specific terms. His obsession with sex is purely one-sided. Yet despite these distractions, the book works its careful, methodical magic.

Now I'm reading "The Idiot" by Elif Batuman, also a coming of age novel with some similarities in theme, but very different in execution and effect.

1/3 into The Custom of The Country by Edith Wharton. If it's another 300 pages of Middlemarch's Lydgates go NYC, I'm not sure how much I'll enjoy it.

That's a helluva description.

I know right :) I love Middlemarch obv but Undine is - so far - a dead ringer for Rosamond and a novel just about her would be a tough read.

Would it? Off the top of my head I think that sounds good!

want to reread Eliot's Middlemarch and Wharton's The House of Mirth, I read them in the distant past and remember that I liked them but not much else

I finished Convenience Store Woman. It's a short, easy read. In bed this morning I was trying to figure out what I thought about it. It was pretty clearly intended as a satire and it worked reasonably well on that level, but the trick with satire is an audience who's in on the joke, who knows just how much the author is distorting and exaggerating in order to make the usual seem unusual and grotesque. The author and audience all share the same social and cultural frame of 'normal' and the satire is something of an 'in joke'.

But I'm not Japanese and this put me at a disadvantage in sussing out how the author was deftly using that shared cultural material to get her effects and make her points. My lack of deep familiarity with the details of daily life in Japan (mainly Tokyo) made some of the exaggerations less humorous. What was written to be funny to a Japanese felt merely odd or puzzling to me. Yet, I liked the book.

After tussling with it for a bit, I've concluded that this satire from an unfamiliar culture 'worked' for me as an American because it had an additional mythic quality that went beyond cultural satire. The extreme simplicity of the narrator's voice accentuated this quality. And like most good myths, it contains questions that can't be answered and prompts thoughts that can't be concluded. Pretty good for a novella.

Does anyone have strong opinions about Emily St. John Mandel?

Checked out today:
1. Carlo Rovelli. There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness.
2. Patrick Modiano. Family record.

But next up is a translation of three novel(la)s by Tove Ditlevsen. Yay for Scandinavian novels, which should be their own genre.

Scando Lit: search

Reading Kevin Killian’s SHY for the first time, finally felt ready.

Xxp I read Emily St. John mandel books when they come out and I think they’re broadly fine but I do not have a strong opinion about them and I’m a little surprised how successful they are.

I read the Modiano in February -- pretty good.

i loved paul takes the form of a mortal girl, really crisply written, its sudden shifts into the allegorical really spellbinding, but fundamentally a straightforward narrative about a queer shapeshifter discovering himself through his relationships. i don't necessarily love feeling like i'm looking into a mirror when i'm reading but it really did feel like i was seeing a way more sexually-awakened version of my college self, especially when the characters had endearingly pretentious conversations about music and theory. also the sex scenes were all hot :)

now returning to the cusk outline trilogy with transit and already every sentence is like a fist exploding through my brain it's awesome

xp I think Emily St. John Mandel is almost always readable and quite likable as a writer if that makes sense; sometimes it's just nice to read a fairly talented writer who doesn't strike you as a terrible person. But the only book of hers that's made a lasting impression on me is Station Eleven, which I loved in a qualified way. I thought it was a bit slick and facile and could have done more with its characters, and yet I still found it quite beautiful and moving and I keep returning to it. One of those books where there are a lot of obvious criticisms to make, and yet the things that work about it work well enough for me that I don't mind the rest.

I feel about it a bit like I feel about the Jackson Browne song "Before the Deluge," which it resembles imo: I'm not a big Jackson Browne fan in general, and "Before the Deluge" has its cheesy moments, but then you get to "When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky," and all is forgiven.

Tend to agree with Lily Dale that that novel feels slick and facile. It felt immature and disappointingly shallow to me.

Can pandemic/disaster novels be less slick and facile to be accepted as science fiction, or are they being judged according to different criteria? There was another novel called Severance by Ling Ma. Does anyone have comparisons or comments on the genre (and what saves it or makes it worthwhile to read despite the immaturity)? Is science fiction obviously satire?

or intentionally

Rereading Père Goriot for the first time in 30 years.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 12, 2022

Père Goriot feels like a distant memory. I have recollections of reading it for a book club meeting in 1998, but haven't thought about it since

As ever with Balzac it's his way with bric-a-brac, the meanness of people, the attention to Restoration politics.

There are disaster novels like THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS which are interesting and thought-provoking, though possibly lacking in some qualities of other books.

STATION ELEVEN seems to be a different case because it seems to try to be literary in a way that much SF didn't use to do. I'm not sure that it entirely succeeds.

Ballard's disaster novels would be a different comparison.

I haven't read SEVERANCE.

Some great SF is satirical - Robert Sheckley for instance - but not all SF is satirical.

I started watching the tv series of Station Eleven it does seem a tad white liberal which is a shame cos it does have a pretty diverse cast.
I'm about 4 episodes in and watching a los=d of other things at the same time.
Found a cheap copy of the book which is sitting around teh flat somewhere. I read an interview in teh guardian with teh writer which made reading things by her sound positive. But I have a load of other things to read.

Currently getting further into that book on Soldaten which is really interesting and has a very scathing view of the run of teh mill soldiery from Germany in WWII. I was wondering what else was like this about other soldiers. Think Mark baker's books Nam and Cops may touch on some things with some similarity. & would think there may be more things from Vietnam talking about War crimes etc. Probably true of later wars that the US have been involved in. NO idea of other armed services around the World but don't think anybody in a situation like taht is 100% driven by a clear morality.
THis is good though, pretty difficult reading if you're remotely squeamish

1/3 through THE SPACE MERCHANTS. The first third is like Don Draper in the 23rd century - tremendous. Then suddenly it changes - he is kidnapped and wakes up having been given a new false identity. This is not so promising. Feels like the Don material had much further to run before being cut off.

There is an indigestible preciousness about Mandel's writing that seems like a very specifically Canadian MFA style to me (speaking as a sometime Canadian resident). It's this overreliance on whimsically poetic "good sentence writing" over the top of plastic characters and embarrassed plotting. As you read the book, you can imagine it being written by a smartly dressed young person in a coffee shop.

That said she wrote short time-travel story for Slate, that I remember really enjoying. It was also precious but satisfyingly well-plotted and less self-conscious.

Tend to agree with that assessment by poster Chuck Tatum.

the pinefox, you might like severance. it's thematically a little similar to jonathan lethem's the arrest, which you moderately liked iirc? but it's much better imo.

station eleven feels more obviously middle brow scifi melodrama (not sure what this means), like a realist cloud atlas?

also requested for check out which should be an alternative to purchased: Three Californias by Kim Stanley Robinson and a book by Kelsey Ronan (I think her debut novel)

I am intrigued by the NYT review of Simon Kuper's Chums and the persistence of class in the UK, which seems distinct compared to elsewhere in Europe, and this is not intended as a criticism, but a point of interest, perhaps worth saving, except for the cost

Poster Caek, yes, again I tend to agree with that view of S11. I think I like CLOUD ATLAS though!

i liked cloud atlas too! i don't think i mean it as an insult. more an attempt to characterize her goals/"target audience"?

I'm reading City of Nets by Otto Friedrich. If you'd given me a precis - a history of Hollywood in the 1940s, through vignettes of the likes of Louis Mayer, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Howard Hughes, Hedy Lamarr, alongside capsule biographies of the major films and writers - I'd have chewed your arm off to read it. But somehow the episodic style, with anecdote running into gossipy vignette, renders everything glassy and flat and I find I'm struggling for purchase. I'll persevere.

Just started Fatale, Jean-Patrick Manchette, in the NYRB reissue. Even after a few pages it's apparent that this crime noir will be somewhat ott. It's also another short one, under 100 pages.

haven't yet read any of them, but i've gotten the impression that all of manchette's crimes are ott

Yep

also: rad

Think so far I’ve only read The Prone Gunman tbh, although I bought a few others.

Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad
Annie Ernaux - A Woman's Story
Kenneth Irby - Catalpa

Currently reading Dasa Drndic's EEG and Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory.

zak m— Irby is one of my favorite poets, if you ever want to nerd out about him let me know— one of my prized books is a copy of one of his late chapbooks, warmly inscribed to Gerritt Lansing. I’ve even written a little about my favorite poems of his, from the short book To Max Douglas.

ah, cool, thanks, zak and tabes. I was going to ask for a poetry rec.

Alfred, unfortunately Irby’s best stuff is really only available in the enormous and pricey collected, but if you look around Abe or Bookfinder, his smaller press books and chaps are widely available and often pretty cheap (and also beautiful objects).

I adored Catalpa, but I'm probably not articulate enough to describe it. I read it as unapologetically musical and conversational. Observational and descriptive, where observational includes landscape, reading, history, introspection. 1970s California + Midwest, "age of explorers" colonial violence & hubris, family history, Coleman Hawkins... So it's referential, but doesn't read as a string of cherry-picked allusions (thinking about our internet era writing hatched in the shadow of wikipedia or whatever).

I sometimes find the big collections intimidating, and the original context feels meaningful -- I read it as an interlibrary loan, though, so I didn't have dig around.

Glad you liked it— it is one of my favorites of his. It’s a really quite arresting example of early eco-poetry that seamlessly moves from the literal soil to the glacial movements that caused that soil to be there to the colonial machinations that sullied that soil and so on. Few come close to it, imho.

Here’s an interesting squib about it from poet Andrew Schelling: https://jacket2.org/article/kenneth-irby-and-catalpa

Gwendoline Riley - Sick Notes
Sarah Bakewell - How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

I'm making good stries with Tess of the d'Urbervilles which is fine sentimental heroin VS rough social conditions / conventions. Summer surprised us with a shower of rain.

This year I also returned to Soseki (Kokoro), Vargas Llosa (The Green House), Sebald (Austerlitz). Also discovered with pleasure Laxness (Iceland's Bell), Schwob (Imaginary Lives), Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro). On the other hand, had little patience for Austen (Emma) and Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle), though I loved other of their books.

My face for the world to see - Alfred Hayes

Finished The Custom of the Country. As with The Age of Innocence I wasn't sure I was going to like this book about awful people but by the middle it had won me round; unlike with The Age of Innocence I cooled towards the end. Ralph is a great tragic hero, the part where she breaks up with him is outstanding, and that their son is at the crux of things adds an extra twist of the knife. But though Undine develops far beyond her initial similarity to Middlemarch's Rosamond, she remained too dislikeable and too central for me to really warm to the book as a whole, impressive though it is.

George V Higgins "Kennedy for the Defense". I've occasionally read that Leonard stole Higgins's shtick but it seems like they were contemporaries? This is fun but not nearly as good as Leonard's concurrent hot streak (e.g. The Switch, Stick, etc) and some of the dialogue goes on way too long.

Finished The Custom of the Country. As with The Age of Innocence I wasn't sure I was going to like this book about awful people but by the middle it had won me round; unlike with The Age of Innocence I cooled towards the end. Ralph is a great tragic hero, the part where she breaks up with him is outstanding, and that their son is at the crux of things adds an extra twist of the knife. But though Undine develops far beyond her initial similarity to Middlemarch's Rosamond, she remained too dislikeable and too central for me to really warm to the book as a whole, impressive though it is.

Wharton is the bomb.

That too.

Wharton occupies a slightly sweeter spot than Henry James in my esteem.

My present book is The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels. Nice to read exegesis on the Bible that frames things in terms that include history, culture and politics in addition to theology. It all makes much better sense when viewed in a more complete historical framework.

Currently revolving between the following and reading a few stories/chapters a day:

David G. Hartwell (ed.) – Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder
Patricia A. McKillip – Harrowing the Dragon
M. R. James - Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories
Edgar Allan Poe - Complete Stories and Poems
Stanley Cavell – The World Viewed

Finished Pohl / Kornlbluth, THE SPACE MERCHANTS. SF, satire (with lots of terrific inversions very casually relayed: the ad-man who can't bear to read a book unless it has adverts in it; the President who has no power in DC), and also a kind of hard-boiled thriller; industrial espionage. The text of my pulpy copy is often botched, but the writing is more punchy than Asimov, more controlled than Dick. Feels like a key book. Such a thriller that I'm surprised if it's never been adapted to the screen.

I'd like to read Pohl's memoir next: THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS.

That book is good, thought they were thinking of reissuing it, they meaning his family. He used to have a blog too, The Way The Future Blogs, that had lots of good stuff on it, but it's gone off the internet now because of..something. Maybe for the new book.

I met both him and Asimov. Pohl seemed really nice, a little reserved, almost seemed depressed compared to all the other loudmouths in the airport hotel at the sf convention. Asimov I had met a few years earlier when I won some kind of prize for some BS I wrote. prompting my English teacher or the Board of Ed or some other organization to send me to the related event. I asked him for an autograph and handed him my Junior High School graduation autograph book and he signed it but in no other way acknowledged me or looked it me. I guess I wasn't in the class of fan who could give him a Hugo Award or anything else he might want from a fan.

My friend met Ray Bradbury once which is probably a much better story, but not my story, so not sure whether to type it in.

You met Asimov, and Pohl? That's super!

I met Brian Aldiss! - which is good but still maybe not quite the same.

aldiss >>> asimov

^this

Do you have an aldiss anecdote for us, the pinefox?

Since you ask ... just about. It was an SF convention. I hung about with a woman I knew who was studying SF. I talked to Aldiss with her, soaking up his fame, his aura, the fact that I was in his presence for a few minutes ... (did I get him to sign something? I don't think I did) and he more than once said to me, in front of her, something like "You want to keep hold of her" and "Take care of her". I suppose he thought we were a couple - the kind of impression that is generically understandable, but she was probably much too glamorous for me. I was mildly embarrassed on her behalf, perhaps mildly flattered on mine.

(I don't think the SF lady was bothered one way or another by this brief faux pas, she already had a bf who was much more impressive than me.)

I wish I had taken a copy of NON-STOP or TRILLION YEAR SPREE along!

I think Aldiss said a few other things actually, I should see if I made any notes.

Now I think of it, I seem to remember people queueing up to have books signed by Aldiss and rather than handing him eg: one new book to be signed (as is quite normal), they'd have brought a box of 12 old books by him and required him to sign them all.

Feel like I've seen that at various signings. A question of etiquette.

James Redd, it's a pity you couldn't turn up to Asimov with the complete works of Isaac Asimov and ask him to sign them all. Two hours in: "A commentary on the Old Testament, volume 3 ... best wishes, Isaac Asimov".

Ha, exactly! Maybe I could have saved time by just bringing Opus 100, 200, 300,... etc. and a few Lucky Starr (as Paul French) books.

following my completion of a glastonbury romance (two thumbs up) have just done a reread of wyndham lewis's the childermass in anticipation of finally getting around to the later two books of the human age sequence. very much a book of two parts: the opening section provides an impressive visual description of a post-world war purgatorial wasteland where time and space are not as they were on earth... followed by the near interminable second part featuring the heavenly (or hellish) presiding judge-punch-bailiff figure spouting discoursing at length with various antagonistic interlocutors on lewis's then current preoccupations (bits of which i vaguely recall from the long ago read the art of being ruled, the revolutionary simpleton essay & time and western man) which makes up the bulk of the work.

Now I think of it, I seem to remember people queueing up to have books signed by Aldiss and rather than handing him eg: one new book to be signed (as is quite normal), they'd have brought a box of 12 old books by him and required him to sign them all.

Feel like I've seen that at various signings. A question of etiquette.

James Redd, it's a pity you couldn't turn up to Asimov with the complete works of Isaac Asimov and ask him to sign them all. Two hours in: "A commentary on the Old Testament, volume 3 ... best wishes, Isaac Asimov".

the journalist by harry mathews

i found out about mathews (the american guy in oulipo) after reading georges perec last year. it's pretty hard to find his novels, but i finally came across a dalkey archives edition of this one at city lights in san francisco. only a couple dozen pages in but it's very funny so far

that’s a good one!

I was really into Harry Mathews for a while, think Cigarettes was my favorite.

(what seems universal in reading Tove Ditlevsen is the position of women but the importance of this with respect to other matters may be contextually determined. i could understand if most people on sinister ended up being her fans and writing songs for her poems. what makes sympathy?)

(not to mean that they are powerless but that their power if any is negotiated and contingent)

in that situation are you supposed to hold their elbow or their back at a certain angle to indicate deliberately awkwardness or detachment unless the inclination is to do otherwise?

On to Frederik Pohl, THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS (1978) - a memoir of SF life, already to James Redd (and the Blecchs). Terrifically readable so far. Strong sense of the 1930s Depression, and of Brooklyn with its civic pride as a former rival to NYC; Fulton Street, Flatbush Avenue, etc.

This plus the theme of friendship and collecting ('my best friend had a better collection of SF magazines than I did; we read them all afternoon' - that kind of thing), not to mention the collective discovery of SF itself by clubs like the Brooklyn SF League ... all makes it uncannily a precursor of Lethem, 40 years later. Though Lethem knows the history well, I'm not sure I've seen him acknowledge how much his 1970s script was a retread of this one. Even the sense of political crisis is analogous, from 1930s Depression / pre-WWII to 1970s Watergate / blackout era.

We still have Judith Merril and the Futurians to come - and presumably close encounters with Asimov and others. Marvellous.

Some intense stuff coming up involving Merril and Walter M. Miller Jr. iirc.

I know he wrote about it on the blog, can’t remember how much detail got into the book.

Also thinking the next book if you continue on this Pohl jag should probably be Gateway if you haven’t read it yet.

The Water Lily Pond by Michael Siegel. A Kindle Unlimited book recommended to me by Amazon. An interesting conceit--in the near future, aging has been pretty much stopped by advancements in medical technology. The "world's greatest living painter" decides, at 128, to stop taking "the Daily" and die of old age. As far as I can tell, it's self-published, and is surprisingly well-executed, although it suffers from a lack of proof-reading.

Is GATEWAY the key Pohl novel? Looks like it's very late-career.

Eminent Victorians, its insistently insouciance the source for New Yorker journalism since mid 20th century.

There is another novel written with Kornbluth: GLADIATOR-AT-LAW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator-At-Law

Is GATEWAY the key Pohl novel? Looks like it's very late-career.

Although Shakey preferred other stuff like Jem.

There are two more novels written with Kornbluth - Wolfbane and Search the Sky (Pohl tinkered with the latter in the 1960s) - and quite a few short stories, again some of them completed posthumously by Pohl.

Man Plus (1976) was considered Pohl's 'late' career comeback novel, although I agree that Gateway is more fun. After that, there's a good twenty more years of novels and short stories - incredibly productive writer! Just like Brian Aldiss.

I've just finished reading Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
by Alec Nevala-Lee which I think Pinefox would find a useful adjunct to his current SF studies. As others have said, despite his unforgivable dirty old manisms, Asimov still comes out of the book as the most sane and reasonable of the main players - but that may only be because the others were SO monstrous. Pohl features (I suspect the quotes are taken mainly from his autobio) as a Campbell-sceptic mainly, but also as Asimov's agent and very late collaborator.

I didn't know that the basic idea for Caves of Steel came from Horace Gold.

That's all promising material, WF, thanks for posting.

This ASTOUNDING book sounds very much up my space-lane. I don't know about dirty old man - my own sense of Asimov as writer, if not as person, is more of a coy asexuality, simply an embarrassment about such things - but I do imagine that Asimov would be the sanest and most decent of the main names listed (though not necessarily better than Pohl, Sheckley, Kornbluth, or others). I mean for sanity and decency, Hubbard wouldn't be your #1 choice ?!

I very much want to read THE CAVES OF STEEL, since reading Adam Roberts' recommendation of it. I suspect that it's like a longer version of one of the I, ROBOT stories. I'm interested in Horace Gold. Am sure Pohl's memoir talks about him, wonder if there are others?

He always comes up. Daniel Keyes’s memoir too. He even gets a mention in the collected letters of John Cage, since Cage was an attendee at his legendary Stuyvesant Town poker game. Maybe Garland Jeffreys lives in that apartment now.

my memory of caves of steel is that it isn't. (it's been 9 years mind).

all the short robot stories are 'gven the 3 laws, what would happen if...?'. caves of steel is more detective story with a robot in it.

the wikipedia page has a link to a scan of the original Galaxy Magazine version on archive.org

Another regular, Robert Sheckley, mentions him briefly here: http://aaasheckley.com/bio/page8.html

The main robot in The Caves of Steel is so sophisticated that there is a lot more going on in his positronic brain than just the Three Laws.

Not surprising about Horace Gold coming up with the idea given the way he lived in that apartment. All kinds of stories about people coming there for meetings and Horace talking through the intercom in the front room but never actually coming out in person.

I’m sure he gets mentioned in one of the many Asimov memoirs but couldn’t tell you which: In Memory Yet Green, In Joy Still Felt, I, Asimov, Opus 40 and a Mule or whatever.

Asimov well-known for being extremely handsy and having affairs with fans. There was relatively recent discussion of this but I can’t find it right now.

His son got totally messed up too. His nephew Eric was the one who took up the womanizing. But yeah, overall pretty sane compared to a lot of the others. Never became a Renfaire Libertarian etc. as far as I know.

There’s this:
https://lithub.com/what-to-make-of-isaac-asimov-sci-fi-giant-and-dirty-old-man/
Which links to this:
https://www.publicbooks.org/asimovs-empire-asimovs-wall/

Was just about to post that.

Just peeked at Daniel Keyes’s memoir again, which I recommend, and confirmed that Horace Gold wanted to change the ending to Flowers for Algernon.

Also this version, from Barry N. Malzberg’s introduction to The Galaxy Project edition of. C.M. Kornbluth’s WITH THESE HANDS:

The narrative then continues as recollected by Mills, my agent in 1973, who insisted on every detail. “We took the same train from the city home,” he said, “and on a ride back I said to Dan, ‘This is a very nice story, but I have a few suggestions.’ And Keyes burst into tears and gripped me by the lapels and said, ‘No, no, no, don’t be like Horace! Horace says that I have to keep Charlie smart. I can’t do it, I just can’t do it!’

Sorry, forgot to put SPOILER ALERT!

Finished Kevin Killian’s Shy, think I’m going to move onto the new Lisa Robertson book next.

Chapter 62 of I, Asimov is entitled “Horace Leonard Gold.”
(xp)

At the risk of beating a dead astronaut, in addition to writing the amazing Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee is really into Borges and has written several essays about him, in particular this one: https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/the-borges-test/.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer. A sort of sequel to Borne, it's a book that flirts with being weird just for weirdness's sake but manages to be a worthwhile read.

James Redd, have you really read four memoirs by Isaac Asimov?

Can’t remember how many Opuses I’ve read so it might be more than that, assuming those count as memoirs.

Feel like the original “Dead Astronaut” was Ballard, although there were also Malzberg’s Falling Astronauts.

Another guy besides Nevala-Lee whose take I like is Matthew Cheney. His introduction to Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, “Ethical Aesthetics” is kind of good overview jump-start in itself.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of _Dead Astronauts_ by Jeff Vandermeer. A sort of sequel to _Borne_, it's a book that flirts with being weird just for weirdness's sake but manages to be a worthwhile read.

The Southern Reach trilogy? You can tell it's by the same author, but it's very different stylistically, while retaining the sense of unreality that the trilogy, and especially Annihilation, had. I suppose he's exploring some of the same themes--e.g., biology and its manipulation, alienation, and corporate cynicism--and but in a different voice.

I would recommend reading Borne first. I picked up Dead Astronauts as a special on Chirp, and while it stands on its own, the earlier book provides context.

Many thanks! Devoured the Southern Reach books in early 2021, will check out the new stuff.

I read Borne after reading the southern reach and was very disappointed. Felt quite rote by comparison.

Couple of lit sci-fi novellas

Stillicide by cylan Jones: thematically similar to children of men, ie unequal/divided post disaster Britain (this one’s climate change). Not as good.

The employees by Olga ravn (in translation). Very strange and eerie. Hard to follow but there is a very allusive plot. Solaris/annihilation themes but you can tell the writer is a poet. Not my cup of tea but can see what the fuss is about (eg well reviewed in the nyrb).

Out of office by Charlie warzel and Anne Helen Petersen. Vaguely leftist business/self help book. Not great tbh.

Hmmm, I'm only about 30% into it, but I wouldn't describe Borne as rote. Not entirely successful, perhaps, but it seems to me he was trying something different.

Rote is probably unfair. It’s much more conventional in form/voice than annihilation though.

Yeah, in terms of narrative structure it's much more conventional than Annihilation, let alone Dead Astronauts.

It's hard for me to think of another book that creates the sense of unreality and dread in me that Annihilation did.

Otm

THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS continues to be great reading. Brisk, clear, and generous to others. The world of publishers and magazines in their sketchy Manhattan rented offices - this could be a novel in itself.

Have you got(ten) to the part about his blurb writing yet?

What a cover!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609156983i/1117714.jpg

Oopsh

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609156983i/1117714.jpg