Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

The season has changed and ILB must heed the call of summer and bid farewell to: Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I just finished The Children of Men, P.D.James. I found much to enjoy about it. The premise of a world where human procreation had ceased globally and suddenly was simple but compelling and provided scope and depth in its imagining and James handles all the parts of her story with great skill right up to the final few pages. But when I put the book down I felt a bit sour and disappointed because at its very heart and center this felt like a nakedly Tory novel, offering Church of England bromides about sin and redemption as its central luminous truth. James wanted me to feel uplifted, deeply moved and inspired, but instead it felt cheap and empty and left me feeling a bit cheated.

Have you watched the film?

I used to work in a bookshop where P.D. James was a regular customer. She was perfectly pleasant, quite chatty even, but ALWAYS used to complain about the music we played (which to be fair often strayed into the aggressively unlistenable). If I saw her coming I would always try and put a bit of Merzbow on.

Finished On Race 34 Conversations In A Time Of Crisis by George Yancy plus a load of philosophers and other changemakers this morning.
Running through the book noting down the other books mentioned in it for further reading.

Whores, Harlots and Hackabouts: A History of Sex For Sale Katie Lister.
Nice book with history and a lot of related illustration, not exactly graphic but more memorabilia or something.
I like her writing and podcast presentation . So will probably get hold of her other book before long.

The Total Library JOrge Luis Borges
collection of his various essays etc that I've had hanging around for about 20 years without reading for some reason. Had just finished An Autobiography by Angela Davis as my bog book and had had that for about the same time and most of that sitting on top of a bookshelf unit.
So great to get that read and same with thsi which is mainly short pieces.

Am readig a lot more non-fiction than fiction at the moment so should probably read some fiction soon. I think I'm still buying some of various genres so hopefully get around to them without waiting 20 years .

Have you watched the film?

No. I came to the book unsullied by any expectations.

I recommend it, and it became a favorite 'round these parts in fall '16.

I'm curious to know, have you read the book?

I haven't. Few of those bromides survive in the film, which becomes the most harrowing of road films. I didn't get Tory vibes either, but I might remember mild discomfort here or elsewhere about the future of the planet or whatever depending on a mother and her baby.

The film is much, much better than book.

winter reading: wyndham, bradbury, bester, sheckley, zelazny

If I saw her coming I would always try and put a bit of Merzbow on.

― Ward Fowler, Friday, 24 June 2022 bookmarkflaglink

👍👍👍

Finished George Moore, ESTHER WATERS (1894). I've remarked already on some curious aspects of this book. It does contain some quite vivid writing about London and indeed about the Downs where they go for a big 'derby' horse race. It depicts great poverty and hardship, and thus brings a sense of 'the simple pleasures of the poor', ie: anyone who can get a chop or a pint or a blanket at the end of a hard day is winning at life for a few hours. The ending has poignancy, especially with Esther's return to her former employer and their companionship. At this point it even makes religious worship sound a fair ideal, the heart of a heartless world.

James Joyce's DUBLINERS has been compared to Moore's THE UNTILLED FIELD, but a look at Joyce's letters today shows him actually thoroughly critical of that book. Joyce did, though, I've heard, send a wreath respecting Moore's death in the 1930s.

not to go too off topic but i worked in a bookstore in a western us tourist town and always tried to push the music a little past the hippie boomer safety line. one time i had the owner harranging me about how awful robert wyatt's voice sounded when i put on shleep. his righteousness about it was really something. years later i asked this person for a reference via email, and he refused in a rather nasty reply. b4ck of b3y0nd books in moa4, ut4h, the owner, 4ndy n3tt3l, is a libertarian asshole, don't go there, even if you love you some juvenile & boyish western americana.

Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility. I missed the book club discussion about it, but it came in on my Libby app so I'm giving it a go. Seems a bit light so far, but I'm interested enough to stick with it. I quite liked Station Eleven, she's a decent writer of interesting ideas done in rather workmanlike prose.

It overlaps with but is not strictly a sequel to glass hotel, so it might not make as much sense of you haven’t read that.

I'm reading "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong" by Terry Teachout. The writer is not a music critic, and the book tends to stick more closely to the life, rather than delving into musical analysis. What he has to say about the music tends to be unabashed enthusiasm and/or defense against Armstrong's critics. I share Teachout's enthusiasm for the early '30s Okeh big band sides.

Started Joan Didion: LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN, a collection of hitherto 'uncollected' essays. A friend gave me this book.

Unsure how involved she was in compiling this book, but on reflection, what a Didion phrase that is: LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN!

A 1968 essay on W. R. Hearst's castle surprisingly, perhaps even refreshingly, doesn't mention CITIZEN KANE.

I note this review line:

'The peripheral, the specific, the tangible - or, as the writer Hilton Als notes in his foreword, "the Didion gaze", the penetrating prose of a reporter who writes with a scalpel - is by far the most compelling theme in Didion's latest collection of essays' - Vogue

Hard to know where to begin with how bad and incoherent, let alone possibly ungrammatical, that sentence is. Fair to say that Didion wouldn't have written it.

I'm listening to the audiobook of Under the Big Black Sun: A personal history of L.A. punk. It's not a scene or a genre I'm very invested in; the stories are great though. After some brief chapters by John and Exene that serve as a kind of overture, the first extended personal narrative (somewhat unexpectedly) is written and read by Jane Wiedlin. She does a great job communicating the shabby glamor and the magical danger of it all, and I loved hearing so much about the scene from a woman's perspective right off the bat. If the rest of the contributors can rise to her level, then this book will be a smash!!

I'm trying to remember who did the Sex Pistols tour with Terry graham, was Jane Weidlin one of them. Can't find a reference online and not sure where my copy of Punk Like Me Is. I think he was going out with her at one point. He followed the tour in a VW beetle or something and had a couple of LA punk wo9men with him from what I can remember.

I think both Pleasant Gehman and Pamela Des Barres have had John Doe on tehir podcasts talking about his books and I thik I came across another podcast a month or so back interviewing him about them though it may have been an earlier recording.
I need to get hold of them and read them but they don't appear to be in the Irish Library system.

Finished Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, loved it and think it would make a terrific and positively apeshit film.

Following thematically, read an interesting early publication from Dennis Cooper just now, The Missing Men. Has blueprints of some of his later works, including what appears to be one of the first appearances of George Miles.

James's sentences are predictable and decipherable. I think it's the pacing that tries one's patience. I think what is truly difficult to read is when the pacing and uncertainty are made to represent lived experience. I think xyz faulted me for not being able to bear a writer of this sort who wrote about IIRC some mathematical construct in a forest whose book I intend to return to as with Joyce although I missed June 20. I know there is a basic flaw in thinking I have more time than I have.

The threads must be started on the official season start date, which is admirable from a community participation point of view.

The basic consolation of reading is to think that you might understand.

I've started reading The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, about his trekking about in the Great Plains and Rockies a few years before the California gold rush. I read it long ago, at least four decades. It will be interesting to see what I make of it now.

I was supposed to go see Lear yesterday but four of the cast (including Kathryn Hunter) caught covid and the trains were fucked so that was that. Will hopefully reschedule.

Reading Antony Sher's diaries of the lead-up to his playing the part of Richard III in the early 80s. It's a mix of insecurity and neuroses (including frequent reference to his therapy sessions with Monty Berman), meetings and dinners with various actors, producers and directors and the most extraordinary, idiosyncratic sketchings as he begins to develop and inhabit the body of Richard in the build-up to being on stage. So far it's insightful and thoroughly entertaining.

"think xyz faulted me for not being able to bear a writer of this sort who wrote about IIRC some mathematical construct in a forest"

?

Correction surely

Or some bernhard anyway

Don’t know where else to put it except various lefty threads, but it appears as though Mike Davis has entered palliative care and is expected to pass soon . He is the best Marxist historian and thinker, afaic, and has only become sharper and more strident as he’s aged.

felt like the right time to read A Handmaid's Tale for the first time. feels like it would be better coming to it cold, the way it's unveiling things slowly.

I finished the Didion collection

Joan Didion

and have quite a few books to get on with next.

Because of her recommendations

Don’t know where else to put it except various lefty threads, but it appears as though Mike Davis has entered palliative care and is expected to pass soon . He is the best Marxist historian and thinker, afaic, and has only become sharper and more strident as he’s aged.

Very sad to hear re: Davis.

--

Correction surely

― Wiggum Dorma (wins), Sunday, 26 June 2022 bookmarkflaglink

I was thinking maybe Oulipo.

I have just started reading a book entirely because of ILB poster Ward Fowler. They kindly noted that I was exploring Golden Age SF and recommended: Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. I mentioned this to my brother and was later quite pleasantly surprised when he gave it to me for my birthday.

It looks like a doorstopper, but 100pp at the end is notes and it seems to move along in a zippy, trade-press, popular-biography way. I suppose I'd rather have a book of this kind not centring on these exact people - say, one all about 1950s GALAXY - but that's not the option. A fine recommendation from poster WF.

That's great Pinefox, hope it proves useful to yr studies.

Getting a lot further into Lenny Kaye Lightning Striking.
Now in the Liverpool 1962 thing with the early Beatles or possibly the same era London with Joe Meek.
Enjoying it but the copy I had could be better proofread. So assume that means the full printrun. KorLA Pandit was an artist and I think there are several of those dotted through the book. I thought from some Windrush Foundation events dedicated to him that the Beatles early manager was Lord Woodbine not his business partner Alan Williams. But mainly quite enjoying it and looking forward to what he says about SF 67 and Detroit a couple of years later.

Jorge Luis Borges Total Library.
compilation of a lot of essays and shorter writings with non Argentinian focus translated and compiled in the 90s. Has sat on bookshelves in my various flats for the last couple of decades waiting to be read. Now finally getting to it. & finding it pretty interesting.
But interspersing other things with it including

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism Ha Joon Chang
which is interesting but seems to be a little weird in its gaze, overly Eurocentric or something in places. Which wasn't what I was expecting, and could be a projection/expectation of mine on seeing the writer's name. Still think this is going to be something I do want to read through.

Mario Vargas Llosa - Conversation in the Cathedral*

Halfway through this late 60s Latin American novel about...late 60s things: students, communism, fascism, that whole spaghetti. The halfway interesting thing about it is that Llosa makes a chaffeur one of his main characters so its not your usual intellectual, if you like, navigating through this mess. I start and stop, its a territoy I know quite well so its getting to be a bit of a chore - as well as finding it a bit tasteless given his politics today, so I'm going to stop at the end of Book Two and read something else.

It bored me. The only one of his novels beside the stepmother stuff I enjoyed was Feast of the Goat.

Meant to put my comments here---might as well do replies as well:

Just now on the radio: a passing reference to Dave Chapelle playing the martyred artist card re trans people joeks, and it reminded me of how much more artful and implicitly fair-minded is Hemingway's kinetic portrait of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises: "Nobody ever made him feel like he was a Jew" until he got to Princeton, and he's still the object of loud 'n' proud antisemitic outbursts from a couple of other characters, especially the more successful writer, who also likes to call for "irony and pity," but he's seriously pissed at Cohn---who is seriously shady, a manipulative underdog (good income from his mama, pissed a lot of it away in connection with his furtive first marriage, has recently let his obnoxious long-time fiancee down, with a lot of tears, tears, tears, on his part, making it all that much more disgusting---also he tries to shake hands with guys he's just punched out). He can even be a danger to himself and others, the way he inserts himself into situations where he's not or no longer wanted, beyond limited underdog appeal and/or financial usefulness). So Bill the bigot with the writer's eye shares the others' distrust of Cohn for good reason, but has to add "Jewish superiority," the kind of shit that's added to Cohn's scar tissue and outsideriness. (Hem's got me thinking The Merchant of Venice too.)
(Jake, the narrator with the Debilitating War Wound, also gets increasingly tired of Cohn, though mainly because he's gone off with Jake's love object, cracked lodestone, Brett, for a little time away from her rowdy, flailing fiance, Mike-with-an-allowance, who is not only bankrupt, but "a bankrupt," as he keeps yammering back to: it's becoming his ID: "Cohn's a Jew, I'm a bankrupt": paraphrasing, but not by much,
Jake does resent Brett's gay running buddies for what he takes as [their airs of superiority, but also he seems a bit challenged by her having platonic friends besides himself, since he's got the Debilitating War Wound.)

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 5:46 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

So a lot of this is about antagonism and destruction at different speeds (incl. possibly drinking yourself to death, killing bulls as art and fun, also getting yourself gored, also passing references to effects of "the war," a few years back, and we know they're between Wars/wars.) Also really trying and sometimes succeeding at having a lot of fun, killing time, working and playing around knowing that, while still being thirtysomething, so it's still not as sad as it may well come to be.

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 5:54 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

DUH Award, yes, because I just now finally read that: another brick in my 1957 liberal arts degree.

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 5:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

xpost there's also the 19-or-20-year-old matador whom Jake and Brett are smitten with, but Jake's not jealous of either of them, might be better if he were, to a large (not total) extent.
A previous reader of this book, who has underlined and otherwise marked up most of it, notes at the end that Hemingway has "renounced" fancy Henry James writing, and then quotes James, accurately or not: The greatest human virtue is renuciation." The only renunciation in this story seems a little out of character in terms of high-mindedness, but not in terms of desperation (gotta fly on no matter what, also gotta somehow see myself as a good person), and the author himself, though my impression was already formed by the collected stories, also seems like his wings are singed by high-flying vs. desperation, and reaching for principle, like Beyond The Old Man's Fancy Writing Towers, is part of that (lots of wounds and flashbacks and compulsive travel in those stories too).

― dow, Sunday, June 26, 2022 6:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Terrible James joek exchanged b/w Bill and Jake too.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, June 26, 2022 6:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I did not really admire THE SUN ALSO RISES. Disappointing.

― the pinefox, Monday, June 27, 2022 2:34 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I had to acquire a taste for Hemingway:there's a sense of something tightly yet just barely lashed together, something that I have to get used to all over again each time I read another story or book, that is off-putting in his compulsiveness, beyond and within his strict commitment to art, which does remind me of James, but Hemingway's damaged goods, like his characters, and pretty up front about it, take it or leave it---is easy to infer, but that doesn't make it easier to get used to, which could be part of his art.

It's more apparent in the short stories, but also brushing by from time to time in the whirl of TSAR, he continuing preoccupations w lots of wounds and flashbacks and compulsive travel

I mean, among his leading contemporaries (incl. older and younger writers), I don't have that same sense. even with Virginia Woolf, though it's entirely possible that my simple male mind is missing things---but she seems to sublimate her damage into something great at times, something at least good usually, and it's vibrant as hell, but there's more of a sense of poise in itself, not that little shiver as he rides the wave.

Sometimes he does overcompensate.

I read, and hated, The Sun Also Rises at University; as a non-practicing Jew I found the Cohn character - if not antisemitic in itself, certainly highly suggestive of Hemingway's antisemitism, if that's a distinction worth making. I mean, the novel ends with the annoying Jew getting punched in the face, a bit like the trope of the rich bully who gets pushed into a fountain at the end of a 1980s college movie. And Hemingway's reputation rests - unfairly or not - on his Spartan sentence construction; that might be right, but I didn't find them to be very interesting sentences.

That said - is there another Hemingway worth trying? My take on him is still the take of a sullen 19-year-old.

The Garden of Eden, his unfinished and deeply weird novel about gender/sexual roles.

"And Hemingway's reputation rests - unfairly or not - on his Spartan sentence construction; that might be right, but I didn't find them to be very interesting sentences."

This seems to me accurate.

It's odd that people are so often praised for sparse or spare writing, when what this amounts to is quite often not very interesting writing.

It’s about an assertion of toughness and manliness in the limp-wristed and female ( if no less abysmally racist and anti-semitic) affront called modernism—

ie “Spare, tough sentences are manly.”

One can find the same sort of thing happening around Carver nearly 50 years later— the experimental and feminist works were vastly overshadowed by the hype around Carver’s spare stories of awful alcoholics being awful.

Carver's later stories aren't much about alcoholics tbh; the best ones in Cathedral deal with children.

Rereading Hemingway's short stuff a couple years ago, I was struck by the effect of repetition, by those sentences that a teacher might mark as run-ons. This notion of spareness disappears. At its most mannered -- and it is a manner -- it's another James-indebted attempt to limn a consciousness but instead of going inward it uses landscape and food as signifiers of interiority.

I don’t think we’ll agree about these matters.

That wasn't a defense, though I (can) still read his early stories with pleasure.

I'm reading Hemingway influence (and later subject of a not terribly amusing parody called Torrents of Spring) Sherwood Anderson, and Poor White strikes me as a booklength attempt at extending the psychological landscape of Winesburg, Ohio; in places it's Cather-esque in its evocation of terrain encroached by industry and its effects on these foreshortened lives. And the novel's quite queer quite often, again, like Cather's stuff.

It's odd that people are so often praised for sparse or spare writing, when what this amounts to is quite often not very interesting writing.

The movie equivalent of this is French magazines praising Clint Eastwood as a "Hollywood classicist".

I took Cohn as a sympathetic enough character, though also hard to deal with , in part because of the antisemitic ,treatment he's gotten beginning at Princeton, and the complicated relationships with women, his financially significant mother, his ex-wife, his ex-fiancee, Brett---I enjoy him as a disrupter, currently, away from his desk, not-writing, as writers do, a romantic legend in his own mind, and always good for breaking up the mindlock of the other principals' partying. So I look forward to him like I do Baron Charlus (wonder if that's where Hem got the idea, In Search of Lost Time meets The Merchant of Venus).

meant to type: currently away from his desk, not-writing (procrastinating/researching), as writers do: a a romantic legend in his own mind Jake sees that too.

Jake sees the romantic bit, and mentions Cohn's mention of frustration with writing the follow-up to his (badly received, not very good) first novel. Jake's takes on Cohn are marked by his recall of what happened on this fun trip, but could already seem condescending, like Hemingway on some of his own writer friends in A Movable Feast--but I think that here, the way he deploys Cohn makes up for Hem's asshole tendencies.

What's good by Mohammed Mrabet? Good translation of Zamyatin's We? Looks there are quite a few versions.

Under The Glacier, Halldór Laxness - Young theologian gets sent to a far off corner of Iceland to investigate a parish where, the church fears, the local priest has gone astray. On arrival he is faced with villagers who are philosophical, drily humourous and incapable of giving straight answers. They do, however, provide him with an endless supply of dried up cake and prodigious amounts of coffee - suffering from IBS I really feel for the narrator's horror at having to empty jug after jug of the stuff for fear of offending.

Been dipping into Lorine Niedecker’s collected. Had never been able to access her work before, and am
now completely convinced of her brilliance. Great when this happens!

paging ledge. have you read this

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/mother-of-invention-how-good-ideas-get-ignored-in-a-world-built-for-men

(she was on a podcast i was listening to this week and it reminded me of that design-ignores-women book you read recently but with a more positive twist. the rolling suitcases anecdote sounded fascinating)

thanks, just bought it!

There’s something about the description of that book that gave me pause, as its premise seems tied to the idea that growth and expansion are a social good, and also that having more women in the boardroom will somehow make the necrotic effects of capitalism better.

A more radical take would be that pantsuit corporate feminism has nothing to do with actual women on the ground, and that the mindset of constant growth is what immiserates populations and women in particular. I understand this isn’t a popular view and so it wouldn’t necessarily sell a lot of books, but just something about the description that rubbed me the wrong way— is it just that the PR materials don’t do a good job of explaining what the book is doing, or is it actually just another book about the dearth of women in the boardroom that completely sidelines 99.9% of actual lived experience?

'Constant growth' is ecologically bad, I believe.

An argument against 'corporate feminism' was made by this UK journalist:
https://repeaterbooks.com/product/lean-out/

I've been reading a lot of white feminism this year. brown women talking about a perspective on female empowerment that includes the women who were excluded by the earlier narrative. One synechdochal summary point has been that in order for women to take on corporate roles they have had to rely on housekeepers and childminders to alolow them to be able to dedicate their time but tend to be overlooked and ignored in terms of their role/part of the equation allowing women to be powerful.

Also white women have been used as and to an extent intentionally gone along with the damsel in distress role which has been integral in excusing things like lynching black males. Also using white tears as an instrumental tool for shaming other women and excluding tehm from dialogue.

I agree that constant growth is unsustainable and that slow growth would be more enjoyable for everyone. However, I think that trusting in others in power to act on your behalf or to see your point of view has in past history been futile. That is why I think so many DEI initiatives in the US focus on hiring. The differences in male and female leadership might not be felt in workplace decisions and conduct but are felt IMHO in terms of worklife balance and the work that is not considered work.

that last paragraph sounds to me like it was added to get men to read it... the podcast was more about the inventions and the sexist nature of wheels, the economy didn't get a mention.

(although she said in the podacst that it got some odd traction as a father's day gift in her native sweden)

podcast here: https://cosmicshambles.com/bookshambles/katrine-marcal

Thanks koogs, i don’t “do” podcasts for various reasons but I really am curious about this book, and your explication makes sense.

Another podcast with the same author
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CL1hNuceONzfn36VMkeCv?si=8e7698e616d64819

(June 16, rather, many posts above. Was Hemingway admired because of the influence of certain philosophers in literary theory?)

J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself

I don't do podcasts either, just because I am not up to the technology of this stuff at this point.

A pity as people constantly recommend it.

I discovered Niedecker through her collected poetry, too. Browsed it from the shelf at the bookstore and immediately bought it.

> I am not up to the technology of this stuff

"the technology" in this case = clicking a single button. that second one is just spotify. the first one uses an embedded player (although it does divert to making you install the soundcloud app if you're on mobile and don't have it (i don't)) (i guess spotify does the same but i don't spotify) should be ok if you stick to using the pc

It bored me. The only one of his novels beside the stepmother stuff I enjoyed was Feast of the Goat.

I read La guerra del fin del mundo, and I thought it was tremendous.

I discovered Niedecker through her collected poetry, too. Browsed it from the shelf at the bookstore and immediately bought it.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, July 1, 2022 8:52 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The surprising thing for me was that I had tried getting into her before, and had the Collected sitting on a shelf for years and years. I'd take it down every so often, read a bit, then put it back up— I just didn't "get" it.

Then the other night I read a review in an old fugitive periodical from 1987 published by the UCSD Library that included a review of her work, which I read and found interesting. It prompted me to pick up the book again, and all of a sudden, I was completely blown away by her poems— the early work and late work is especially great, imho.

In any case, it goes to show that sometimes it's worth keeping books around that you have a *feeling* you might be into someday. Happens to me once or twice a year, tbh!

Koogs: anything that just involves playing something from a website, on a computer, that I can plug in to a hi-fi - should be OK for me.

That should include BBC Sounds.

Other things like Spotify, let alone Apple or whatever else, less so.

On the BBC they say 'wherever you get your podcasts' and I don't really understand what they mean - as if any given individual has some kind of podcast provider - an unknown concept or experience to me.

Anything that involves a mobile phone for this stuff, is probably not going to happen for me. I'm not sure whether my mobile even has the capacity (ie: space, in some sense - I don't mean it's not advanced enough, I acquired it in 2019).

Tbh I'm no technophobe or Luddite and I also found the "wherever you get your podcasts" think really difficult to parse for a while.

I also hate podcasts and podcast culture, tho, so I figured it out enough to d/l "S-Town" back in the day when I was doing a lot of looooooong drives, and then never did anything else with that knowledge

I finished the Louis Armstrong bio. It's long but kept my interest throughout. Armstrong was a fascinating character. It seems very difficult to find anyone who knew him who had anything bad to say about him. Not that he was a saint by any conventional definition. The relationship between Armstrong and his long-time manager, Joe Glaser, was also interesting, esp in contrast to the abusive Col Parker-Elvis relationship depicted in the recent "Elvis" movie. In many ways Glaser was just as controlling, but somehow the dynamic was more fruitful on both sides.

I'm about two-thirds into The Oregon Trail. I wondered what I'd make of it now after first reading it in the late 1970s. First off, it is a detailed eye-witness account of life among the Ogallala Sioux written by a keen observer, which gives it considerable value as a historic document. Unfortunately, he could not speak a word of their language(s) and was therefore confined to crude translations and looking only at surfaces.

The biggest drawback of the book is that Parkman was a wealthy East Coast university-educated Brahmin, who was fascinated by, and clearly admiring of, the Sioux, but feels a constant need to distance himself from them by treating them as colorful savages. This belittling tone is so deeply woven into his observations that it feels obsessive, like he's protesting too much, all to reassure himself that his culture and education endow him with an innate superiority. This is an irritant and I do what I can to block it out.

Even with these glaring deficiencies, it is worth reading, if only because it records accurately observed sights and experiences that have since vanished, leaving few traces. This book is both distorted and irreplaceable.

was gonna update this thread to say i’m reading the marbled swarm by dennis cooper which is both vile and hilarious and then got confused by all the podcast talk

Marbled Swarm is a great departure for him, but it’s one of my favorites of his

Glen Matlock I was A Teenage Sex Pistol
Quick read, thought I'd give it a shot in the wake of Pistol. Still need to read teh Jones version.
Not sure about chronology since he has teh band already mostly formed while Malcolm is away trying to manage the New York Dolls. John hasn't joined but the previous line up is playing a lot .Need to check that out, when Sex started and how it ties in with that Red Patent Leather era, Cos might assume that NYD was before.

Anyway it's an interesting quick read

Jorge Luis Borges Total Library.
I had just read the piece on the various translations of 1001 Nights this morning when i got a podcast on Folk Stories from Gone Medieval which overlaps. Quite a coincidence since it overlapped & I could have read the Borges any time over the last 20 years, think that was the latest edition of the podcast though
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1xuUNWYWRNvRT6OZFgwBkW?si=e624ae87ec104389

Another podcast with Katrine Marcal that I just noticed on seeing it was about the wheeled suitcase which she talked about on the other pdcast I sent a link to. I found out that her book Mother of invention is in the local library so may get it this week
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6VOYopbeE6BvTbKy8BRF7m?si=88f21963938a475f

Also not sure why I didn't add in that I had got to the section of Lenny Kaye's Lightning Striking on the London Punk scene when i found out that Glen Matlock book had come in. I'm just up to the point in Matlock where he's about to leave. Got as far as Kaye talking about their (Patti Smith) London debut in Lightning Striking. Quite enjoying both. Though Matlock shouldn't be slagging off the Slits really should he?

not beatley enough for glen's tastes iirc

just finished - "things we lost in the fire" by mariana enriquez/just started - "the man who saw everything" by deborah lwvy & "bringing the war home" by kathleen belew

oops that's "bring the war home" not "bringing..."

Took two George Moore books from the obscure, unread stacks of the library. Started THE UNTILLED FIELD (1903, later revised). Could be a long trek. Irish peasant tales. Moore's preface (after a later rewrite) spends almost all its time claiming that his book inspired J.M. Synge's career. Probably false, and if so, an irresponsible use of the space. This is fairly characteristic of Moore, as far as I can see.

hunting among old issues of the LRB for something quite different i came across this amusing and somewhat sceptical review of a book abt george moore: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n11/e.s.-turner/the-staidness-of-trousers

Thought my days of reading 500+ page systems novels were over, but nevertheless just completed and really enjoyed KS Robinson's MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE. Not sure it worked as a novel as such - in some ways the relationship between the scurrying Mary and the PTSD Frank seemed as tangential as that between Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs Dalloway. Also not sure the riddling jeu d'esprit interchapters written from the perspective of a photon or a carbon molecule really worked - just highlighted that KSR isn't TRP and will never create a Byron the Bulb. But funnily enough I did enjoy the whole geo-engineering infodump aspect - on glacier draining, ocean staining, stratospheric aerosol injection etc etc. Feel a little better informed and briefly felt a phantom twinge of potential optimism that meaningful action could still take place (admittedly with the proviso that the novel posits a 20million people death event before anything starts happening).

Now onto Tove Ditlevsen's COPENHAGEN TRILOGY...

Xpost, that LRB Moore piece surely demands a poll on best description of GM:

• an over-ripe gooseberry
• a great big intoxicated baby
• a boiled ghost
• face has the look of a broken egg-yolk
• looks like a drowned man, taken out of the water
• an intoxicated mummy
• a boorish goat
• old pink petulant walrus
• a very prosperous Mellon’s Food baby
• vague, formless, obscene

Insofar as KSR seems interested in problem-solving, to the point that he can even inspire optimism, he would seem to be an interesting revival of a Golden Age SF "engineer paradigm" that was about such a can-do attitude of ingenuity.

John W. Campbell Jr, July 1969:

"If SF doesn't deal with success or the road to success, then it isn't SF at all. Mainstream literature is about failure, a literature of defeat. SF is challenge and discovery. [...] We're going to land on the moon in a month and it was SF which made all of that possible."

I am reading Murder at Teal Pond, which is a true crime story about the murder of a young woman in upstate New York in the first decade of the century. I think it was recommended to me on Amazon and heavily discounted. Supposedly, it's the crime that inspired Mark Frost, of Twin Peaks fame (he spent his summers up there). It's a fascinating case but the co-authors just aren't good writers. The book has the kind of plodding pace I associate with Dick Wolf TV productions. I'll see it through because I am interested in how it turns out (they claim to have figured out the crime), but it's kind of a chore.

Sorry, Teal's Pond

I finished The Oregon Trail. My only additional comment is that Parkman got very obsessed with shooting bison and spends an inordinate amount of time writing about it. I'll choose another book soon, but in the meantime I'm reading a few F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories. Last night I read 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz'.

Have you read butchers crossing aimless? They shoot a lot of buffalo in that.

I've had my fill of buffalo hunting for this year.

picked up Mother of Invention this afternoon. Had finished I was a Teenage Sex Pistol so took that back.
Read part of 1619 this morning as well as another bit of Lightning Striking. ^& bits of several other things last night but finding too many things with too many endnotes going on. & wasn't in the mod for that.

Done my weekly walk around charity shops so got another stack of things I want to read.

Finished The Wild Shore, the first novel included in Three Californias. Science fiction as one might imagine from Mark Twain with place names and details from known places for some readers for additional interest and pause.

i read the first section of MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE and it was absolutely harrowing, jfc

it did not make me want to read another several hundred pages about bureaucrats creating hope, though, no matter how much i wish that would actually happen

There is quite a lot about righteous Indian terrorist cells too, tbf.

MFTF is good, but this line about KSR's interests is in full effect in it, for better or worse:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/can-science-fiction-wake-us-up-to-our-climate-reality-kim-stanley-robinson

"A typical Robinson novel ends with an academic conference at which researchers propose ideas for improving civilization. He believes that scholarly and diplomatic meetings are among our species’s highest achievements."

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1YtYPjk0YxwAh4tCeDySeY?si=573630c11e62418c
Listened to City Arts talk by KSR this afternoon as i walked around

It's intriguing that KSR wrote a whole book on PKD (think it was his PhD thesis?), as Dick seems to have been so temperamentally different.

Then again it may not be so intriguing - I once looked, too briskly, at the book, and it didn't look that distinctive. But maybe if one really knew KSR (which I don't) as well as PKD (which I do), it would come alive.

Dick seems to have been so temperamentally different

well tbf was he not fucked-up quite a lot of the time

This is a pretty good discussion about PKD featuring KSR and Lethem

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

TLDR: KSR appreciates the realism (ie novels about regular joes scuffling through SoCal life in unusual circumstances, rather than space operas) while Lethem digs the fucked-up surrealism.

I guess I should read PKD next.
Hello, doo rag.
I think earlier I meant to write "for giving pause." (I think a negative effect of not speaking regularly is forgetting how expressions sound.)

I know he wasn't the inspiration for Kilgore Trout (I think that honor goes to Theodore Sturgeon), but he pretty well exemplifies the type: a terrible writer with great ideas.

Actually, I'm not sure he could be called a "terrible" writer, but much of his material was obviously written under the influence of amphetamines.

I found the Great Outdoors (and just outdoors) passages in The Wild Shore and Green Earth (one-volume mixdown of Science in the Capital) to be refreshing in themselves, as well as conveying what's at stake, and what will outlast us, in some forms. Hope to read this new one:

Kim Stanley Robinson first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains during the summer of 1973. He returned from that encounter a changed man, awed by a landscape that made him feel as if he were simultaneously strolling through an art museum and scrambling on a jungle gym like an energized child. He has returned to the mountains throughout his life—more than a hundred trips—and has gathered a vast store of knowledge about them. The High Sierra is his lavish celebration of this exceptional place and an exploration of what makes this span of mountains one of the most compelling places on Earth.

Over the course of a vivid and dramatic narrative, Robinson describes the geological forces that shaped the Sierras and the history of its exploration, going back to the indigenous peoples who made it home and whose traces can still be found today. He celebrates the people whose ideas and actions protected the High Sierra for future generations. He describes uniquely beautiful hikes and the trails to be avoided. Robinson’s own life-altering events, defining relationships, and unforgettable adventures form the narrative’s spine. And he illuminates the human communion with the wild and with the sublime, including the personal growth that only seems to come from time spent outdoors.

The High Sierra is a gorgeous, absorbing immersion in a place, born out of a desire to understand and share one of the greatest rapture-inducing experiences our planet offers. Packed with maps, gear advice, more than 100 breathtaking photos, and much more, it will inspire veteran hikers, casual walkers, and travel readers to prepare for a magnificent adventure.

Hello doo rag, I am reading a horror novel called Totem by David Morrell, the creator of 'Rambo'. It has a cool embossed cover - I wonder if there are any embossed cover collectors/completists out there, I would like to see their shelves.

After Daybreak: The Liberation Of Belsen Ben Shephard
picked this up in a charity shop recently and have had it sitting around near teh computer. So started reading it yesterday.
Have read the Introduction and prologue so far;. They've talked about the set up for how the camp was liberated which was not something I was familiar with as it seems that it wasn't as much a result of a progressive advance in area taken at a point when it was absolutely clear which direction things were going, or at least not as i take it. Seems like it was contested ground and german forces allowed Allied to take the area to prevent spread of typhus but I need to check into that further.
Author also talks of how this was not a perfect success medically as it could have been and how people going into the liberation of the camp went in under prepared for what the medical situation was going to be and therefore didn't have the results they should have. Says something about the loss of another 14000 people over teh couple of months between initial liberation in April and the June of taht year. Which means teh camp must have been larger than I was picturing it. Massive numbers.
I can see this book is going to be a heavy read for various reasons but I think I need to read it.

Mpther of Invention Katrine Marcal
Swedish wriuter looks at influences on why certain inventions weren't take up for a long time after they were invented and first marketed. Looks at the gender divide being one major factor and people not thinking certian things will be taken up thanks to the influence of toxic masculinity or whatever it was called at the time.
Currently I'm not sure how much I like the tone but subject matter is interesting. Written in Swedish and then translated to English I think. May grow on me but not sure . So far only read the first chapter the one on wheeled suitcases. Have heard about that and the next one on how electric cars wound up being overly associated with women which meant they didn't get as fully explored as possible at the time. That and how batteries etc weren't as good at the time. Would think that if they had not had teh association some bit so tec would have developed faster.
BUt do come on it is so much more masculine to have to crank the car each time and not have something effeminate like a roof on the vehicle.
I say heard cos i listened to a few podcast interviews with the author

Lenny Kaye Lightning Striking
currently still in London punk but also transcribing discography and bibliography.
I hope the book is better proofread by the next edition . Seems to carry over to discography and bibliography too.

Poster Piedie Gimbel's PKD video sounds very interesting indeed.

re "regular joes scuffling through SoCal life in unusual circumstances"

Lethem has written a large amount about PKD and sometimes *does* talk about this as an aspect of PKD - though I'm unsure if what is meant in this case is PKD's scuffling SF characters or his scuffling characters in the non-SF, realistic fiction which I haven't read.

The best Lethem line on this (I quote loosely from memory) is "in stories written way into the 1970s, characters fix their cars at weekends, carry briefcases, send interoffice memos and worry about making alimony payments, even when they've already emigrated to Mars".

Heh, "unusual circumstances" is a good euphemism for matters far more unusual and circumstantial than moving to Mars (although that could figure in).

It would be great if somehow the influence of literature and popular fiction, science fiction in particular, could change perceptions of growth to make slow growth coveted, much as one does not want a good novel to end, and to buffer the effects of changes in rate of growth so that the changes are least noticeable to those who have the least to lose. Is science fiction nostalgic?

I am reading The Gold Coast now. It's a bit strange that SKR writes about all of these: military industrial complex; Beach Boys aura; old time OC orange and lemon groves, goats, cows, sage, etc.

I am very much looking forward to PKD. I hope Lethem and PKD got to meet in their lifetimes.

Also, the experience of architecture and design, from strip malls to "AI" enabled homes and places of commerce.

It won't please xyzzz and others, perhaps, but I'm on a Prynne kick— re-read his 'Oval Window' in first edition which a bookseller friend gifted me, then two recent chaps. His poetry remains tremendous and strange.

I hope Lethem and PKD got to meet in their lifetimes.

Lethem hoped that too, but no, they didn't.

Table - I don't care 👍

i also like prynne for the strangeness (tho i imagine i am missing a lot, i am tbh a bit too impatient to get the most out of poetry somehow)

addinbg: i am generally disappointed in the writing about him: even ben w4tson (who tbh i wd hope wd know better) tends to treat it as merely the opportunity for crossword puzzle decoding and thumbs-up for the good politics, but nothing more than this

i am not even sure what more i do want from it? just something richer and in keeping i guess

I haven't read Prynne in anything but dribs and drabs. Thanks for the push.

I finished ASTOUNDING and THE CAVES OF STEEL as described here

Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond

and I now slowly read George Moore's THE UNTILLED FIELD. Not yet convinced that this is very good writing.

Alfred, if you don’t want to spring for the collected, the NYRB reissued ‘The White Stones’ a few years ago, it’s an early work but gives some nice indications of what comes later.

As far as what to expect from him— tbh, his late style is so varied that neither do I! I just find it fascinating that a poet in their eighties can continue to pump out poems that take such a range of formal (if not necessarily stylistic) constraints.

For example, we have ‘Orchard,’ which is a poetic abecedarium of tree-growing fruits.

Then there’s ‘Otherhood Imminent Profusion,’ which injects a Romantic strain of legibility into his work, which has always been consumed by “the ontology of difficulty.”

There’s then ‘Snooty Tip-Offs,’ a 360-page book of mostly couplets and quatrains that seems to be mimicking limericks and sing-song forms of the past while using the most bizarre language possible.

Add about twenty more book and chapbooks and all of this has just been published in the last few years. Yeah, I’m a fanboy and admit it, but really, his recent production alone is astonishing…and that much of it remains interesting makes it even more so.

Mark S, have you read Luke Roberts on Prynne? A useful review is linked to here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2019/08/luke-roberts-reviews-recent-work-by-jeremy-prynne

I also highly rec the Paris Review interview feature— a really interesting view of the man and his work.

cheers!

Reading Amis's The Green Man and getting bored.

It's that depressing state when you're not enjoying a book, but you've already invested so much time, you might as well finish it

It's very short (175 pages) but teeny type. The book itself is quite funny in parts, a well-plotted mystery, lots of memorable lines and memorably horrific moments, but it's not really my thing.

This was from Amis's right-wing loon phases AFAIK but he's unexpectedly strong at interrogating that looniness - I've never read Amis (Kingsley) before

If you are a writer and also teach, how do you feel about what you do in these roles? Can they maintain their independence and freedom? How can we preserve this?

I have some thoughts on your question from my own angle as a poet and educator, youn, but I'm in a bit of a runaround today. Still, keeping your question in mind, as it's a good one!

After spending an evening reading essays by Jorge Luis Borges, I stuck a toe in the waters of Hadrian the Seventh, Frederick Rolfe, as a candidate for my next book, but in the first dozen pages the powerful egoism of the author is so evident it suggests full-blown narcissism, and I'm not sure I can stick with it.

Reading Amis's The Green Man and getting bored.

It's that depressing state when you're not enjoying a book, but you've already invested so much time, you might as well finish it

It's very short (175 pages) but teeny type. The book itself is quite funny in parts, a well-plotted mystery, lots of memorable lines and memorably horrific moments, but it's not really my thing.

This was from Amis's right-wing loon phases AFAIK but he's unexpectedly strong at interrogating that looniness - I've never read Amis (Kingsley) before

― Chuck_Tatum,

Aw! I liked it -- one of his best. I'd have suggested Lucky Jim as a starting point. A lol every page and a half.

I remember liking it too! I might have to get on this Prynne train once I’m done with Ulysses, which I suspect will be next WAYR thread

Aimless have you read The Quest For Corvo, the book about Fr. Rolfe? I thought it was excellent but Hadrian the Seventh always sounded like a bit of a slog.

I'm aware of Quest for Corvo, but haven't read it. Thanks for the tip.

Xposts - yes, I agree, it’s definitely a good book, but I think I read it at the wrong time. For sure going to try Lucky Jim.

This is a slightly lazy question – but has anyone read Lonesome Dove, and cab confirm if it’s worth the effort?

Yeah, I'd say so. Once it gets going, it's very immersive and easy to get through.

I have heard that the sequel and prequels are not as good.

I think I read it around the time the miniseries originally aired.

I am pretty sure I finished it but can't say for certain. For that matter, I can't swear I read it at all.

Conjectures: Poets might have more freedom and independence if there are fewer readers overall than for literature and fiction, and literal interpretations are not assumed. Educators also need to be able to teach with respect and trust and reasonable guardrails. (I was listening to a concert affiliated with a music school in which young composers performed works overseen by a composer on the faculty and the question occurred to me in that context.)

I read a bit more of Mother Of Invention . & while I'm seeing some interesting facts emerging I am also seeing them used to prove things they don't and a number of conclusions being jumped to that need more working. & the message about the gender divide being trumpeted.
I could see a similar subject book being a lot more successful for me. But I just don't think this is the one. Shame cos I'd like to be able to get behind it more. Like can see some of this indicating some of the heavy imbalance it is being used to illustrate but I'm just not into the tone or the if this then definitely this faux logic.
I'm seeing sweeping statements, things that don't follow, conclusions being drawn that aren't as integral as stated.
Definitely interested in a more successfully argued version of a similar book. Will probably finish this one.

After Daybreak Ben Shephard
Finding this very interesting. Just got to the point where they have tried to feed the inmates of the camp and are finding that the rations they have to do that with may be way too rich for systems that have been force starved for months. I know I had read some reference to this before concerning some camp liberation force trying to feed people with reconstituted egg powder and having the response a lot of people here did. Can't remember exactly where taht was but would like to.
Think this is a very elucidating charity shop purchase. Good for 1Eur .

If you are a writer and also teach, how do you feel about what you do in these roles? Can they maintain their independence and freedom? How can we preserve this?

Just started caro’s master of the senate. Great so far obviously.

Can anyone recommend a non-American Caro (doorstops, elegant prose stylist, uses hyper detailed 20th century political biography as a narrative hook to illuminate systems level concerns)?

I doubt many would think it comparable, but John Campbell's massive 2-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher would be the nomination I can think of.

Cool. Did you read about that in ASTOUNDING, the pinefox?

No W in this Campbell, unfortunately.

John *W.* Campbell's massive 2-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher is written by 50 SF writers to whom he gave ideas that he couldn't be bothered to write up himself, and the stories of the Falklands War, miners' strike and poll tax are rather oddly crowded out by credulous accounts of improbable new inventions and psychic techniques.

OMG

I recently started listening to Phoebe Judge's podcast "Phoebe Reads a Mystery." She started it in 2020 during the worst of the pandemic and ended up recording more than 600 episodes. So far I've listened to her readings of The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie and The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I'm almost finished with The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which I had not read and which I have found a pleasant surprise for its humor and multiple points of view. The podcast is worth a listen, not only for the content, but for her voice, which I find both compelling and comforting at once.

Representation Stuart Hall
A text book for an Open University course that looks into the idea of representation. The relationship between word etc and object or process.
Interesting. Hall wrote a lot if this and also edited work by others.
I'm not seeing the name if the course this was for. Am seeing somebody credited as a Professor of Communications on the back though. So wonder if that's it.
Anyway couple of chapters I read were good.

Halfway through THE UNTILLED FIELD. It's short stories, some of them quite separate from each other, some continuing and connecting in SHORT CUTS mode.

I read the story of a priest who decides that Ireland will become Protestant unless the Pope rescinds law that priests must be celibate. In the next story he’s back as the creator of ‘a playhouse in the waste’. Moore’s narrative mode is odd, skipping past actions and statements with confusing speed.

This book is sometimes, I think, spoken of as a precursor to DUBLINERS (1914) - perhaps the very idea of a volume of Irish short stories was still quite unusual? - and there is something about the ambiguous endings, the authorial restraint in passing judgment, that seems a connexion. But Joyce was also, as I recall, openly critical of Moore's collection.

(xpost to table: That makes sense; I have forgotten what it feels like to be a teenager. Ideally there would be coherence, consistency, and room for growth across roles and life stages so that the bildungsroman of the future might not be limited to the loss of innocence or rebellion and there would be less reason for dissembling, or dislocation and confusion.)

SKR is not the one rebelling. He is the friend and then I think the father.

barry mazur and william stein - prime numbers and the riemann hypothesis

nice short book that gets you to understand a few different statements of RH which convey only a glimpse of the awesomeness disparate branches of math it connects. had lots of fun it made me want to read some more serious math again

garielle lutz - divorcer

enjoyed this short (90p) short story collection tremendously. it really shines on a sentence and paragraph level; you could pick it open to a random page and read one paragraph in isolation and odds are you'd laugh. one line that stuck with me was

She had taken "brush with death" to mean "apply death smoothly and gently to your life."

there's often a twisty unruliness to the syntax, with lots of unexpected pronouns and adverbs keeping things interesting. eager to read more lutz :)

now reading teenager by bud smith, off to a strong start

Penelope Fitzgerald’s short story book, The Means of Escape - untouchable as usual. A few I would rate as highly as the novels. I wouldn’t want to recommend which ones as the surprise is part of the pleasure. After this I’ve only got The Golden Child left to read from the fiction.

I hope SKR writes about cybersecurity next.

The Housing Lark, Sam Selvon - More straightahead comedic than I remember The Lonely Londoners being. A great Dudes Rock novel (and thus unsurprisingly not great on gender), love the poetry of the language and the liveliness of a London long gone. Selvon should have much higher standing in popular British literature imo.

whoa had no idea lutz transitioned omg omg omg

One more story to go in THE UNTILLED FIELD. Stories of rural peasant life shift to some stories of Dublin - all around 1900. Some good concepts and details, eg: a (proto-Keynesian?) public works authority that builds unfinished roads to nowhere in the countryside to give peasants labour, leading to a somewhat surreal landscape.

Long story 'The Wild Goose', about an Irish-American back in Ireland who marries a local woman and aims to become a political leader - is interesting, and contains the moment that James Joyce complained about: the wife looks up the time of a train (though Moore hardly insists on this point). Joyce thinks she wouldn't have had to. I think Joyce was being unreasonable and I don't altogether agree with his complaint even if taken straight on its own terms.

Joyce also said that the book was badly written. I'm unsure but it is perhaps clumsy compared to Joyce's own mature fiction, and, as I think I've said, it regularly makes odd unexpected transitions and narrative leaps - I'm unsure how deliberate these are.

After bouncing around from book to book and not finding anything that clicked, I picked up Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, about Richard III and raced through the first 130 pages. She writes well, but also writes entertainingly, which is a fabulous combination.

I haven't read Daughter of Time but I'd safelt recommend Miss Pym Disposes too

i enjoyed daughter of time but the methods of deduction were not very convincing

i thought it was rubbish!

i was being circumspect!

Tey's methodology would be very apt for a criminal defense lawyer, but most of the case she makes hinges on the fact that virtually none the evidence has survived, so she's free to draw major inferences from the few remaining scraps. It's entertaining though.

Just finished Edmund White's A Previous Life, a solid raunch of a beach read

. . . most of the case she makes hinges on

basically phrenology

She does a lot of talking about faces, which is bunk, but she presents many better arguments based on suggestive historic facts. Half her arguments are just fanciful, but the real underpinning of hre argument is that Henry VII had every reason to blacken the memory of Richard III, both by erasing exculpatory facts and promoting a false narrative of Richard's treasonous perfidy, and he had sufficient power as king to do a fairly thorough job of it. In answer she highlights every inconsistency in the accepted narrative and then magnifies it to take the foreground, creating as much doubt as she can. Like I said, good defense lawyer technique.

Renee Gladman - Calamities
Tove Jansson - Fair Play
Jeremy M. Davies - Fancy
Isaac Bashevis Singer - A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories

Richard III Society's American branch having a DC blow-out this fall: topics discussed by experts incl. "A Network of Power and Politics: The Family of Richard III,” "Gunpowder Technology during the Wars of the Roses," and "Labor and Leisure in Medieval Old Age." Entertainment: Hesperus Trio Nova. A Special Concert of Music from the Medieval and Early Renaissance. https://r3.org/2022-gmm/

July 10, 2022

Ricardians Represent Richard in Canada

Susan Troxell, chair of the American Branch, and Sheilah O’Connor of the Canadian Branch, were speakers at Canada’s Stratford Festival in the July 7th Meighen Forum panel, titled “Richard III: Discovered & Uncovered”. The forum was a tie-in to the Stratford Festival’s 2022 production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III”, starring Colm Feore in the leading role. Also on the panel was Professor Randall Martin formerly from the University of New Brunswick.

Sheilah spoke about the historical inaccuracies in the play and painted a positive picture of the king using primary sources. Susan talked about the Looking for Richard Project’s amazing work in leading the 2012 discovery of the king’s remains, and what was learned from his bones. Professor Martin put the play in context of its contemporary anxieties about the succession to Elizabeth I, and the fear of tyranny and factionalism. The event was almost sold out and the audience submitted more questions than could be answered. This was the first in a series of Meighen Forum panel talks in the newly-built Tom Patterson theater complex, with Dr Turi King slated to speak in September about her work on Richard III’s DNA.

Where should I start w Patrick Modiano? Saw passing favorable mention of Suspended Sentences, but, based on descriptions I've skimmed think I might do better with something plottier at this point. Atmospheres and conjectures are fine, but also would like a bit of momentum, at least until getting hooked on the vibe. Will go with Suspended Sentences if it's okay that way; I like that it's novellas.

Ai, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
Lewis, The Premonition
Pinkham, Black Square

Chernovetsky was nicknamed Cosmos; cosmonaut is a slang term for someone fond of dissociative drugs like ketamine and PCP. On one occasion, the mayor crawled under his desk in the middle of a television interview. When he emerged, he explained that he'd been asking God for advice, and that God had said the interview was over. His increasingly erratic and authoritarian behavior prompted calls for a psychiatric examination. In response, he jogged and did pull-ups and laps for news cameras, posing in his little bathing suit, puffing up his chest and flexing his muscles. He was like Putin on acid. The babushkas loved him.

In public health work in Ukraine in the twenty-first century, I heard a lot about the former regions of Novorossiya, southern and eastern Ukraine, which became the center of Ukraine's HIV epidemic as unhappy residents sought comfort in hard drugs. In 2007 a study found that a staggering 88 percent of injecting drug users in Kryvyi Rih, a mining town in the Dnipropetrovsk region, were HIV positive. In 2011, 3 percent of the town's total population was registered as HIV positive, a rate comparable to that in West African countries. A Ukrainian colleague told me that the pollution from the mines in Kryvyi Rih was so bad that a white shirt was stained red by the end of the day. A Canadian colleague who did a workshop there felt certain that it was the worst place on earth.

It was true that eastern Ukrainians were doused in Russian propaganda, and it became increasingly clear that Russia was supplying fighters, arms, and instructions to the separatists. But eastern Ukrainians were also culturally and economically isolated from the rest of Ukraine. They were anxious about the shift of political power away from the east and toward the west. They were worried about their economy, which was dependent largely on trade with Russia, and afraid of austerity measures that would follow the new Kiev government's deal with the IMF. They were fearful and angry at the possibility of a "national idea" that would treat Russian speakers, or people who did not reject Soviet history wholesale, as bad Ukrainians. They were upset because they were poor and under-educated and unemployed and sick and despised by their own countrymen.

Many of the separatists I saw in pictures and videos looked familiar: these were the same sullen, sunken-eyed young men I'd encountered at harm reduction centers, partial to homemade amphetamines and opiates brewed from Ukrainian poppies. But now they had guns; now they were heroes.

The New York Times article glossed over an important question: who was in charge of the fighters who were receiving assistance from these plucky volunteers? Homegrown ingenuity was supporting not only Ukrainian soldiers but also the fifteen to twenty thousand fighters in the volunteer battalions: Dnipro, Donbas, Azov, and all the rest. The donations were not simply bolstering an impoverished army and bankrupt government; volunteers were running a war that was largely independent of the state. The Maidan movement, President Poroshenko, and Western politicians and pundits in favor of arming Ukraine referred, over and over, to Ukraine's commitment to "European values." But a country full of volunteer battalions funded by oligarchs, political parties, and donations looked more like pre-modern Europe than like a potential EU member.

I finished George Moore's THE UNTILLED FIELD. It ended with a story called 'Fugitives' (oddly good modern title) that was comprised of two earlier, cancelled stories combined (that is, Moore had altered the book). The story was somewhat ... perhaps the word is 'creepy'. It's about an Irish sculptor, hired to make a statue of the Virgin Mary, who finds a Dublin girl to pose for him and marvels at her naked beauty. It feels like the narrative logic is that he's going to seduce her, which feels bad and 'exploitative' to me when he has previously got her to undress for a different, supposedly wholesome reason.

Fortunately that doesn't happen. Someone smashes up his statue and he leaves the country. But then a very odd section in London closes the story (clearly this was a separate story that was mashed into the new combination). He meets two other people, one of whom is from the previous story (so the intra-textuality gets heavy) and one of whom is, I think, Moore's alter ego from another book, and is on his way to meet a real person Moore knew very well, Edward Martyn. So we are into intratextuality, intertextuality, and real historical reference. But this alter ego character, Harding, reveals that he has also met the girl (who was the Virgin Mary model) and was tempted to take her sailing around the Mediterranean, but instead did the responsible thing and tried to reunite her with her parents. (The girl is only 17!) So, nothing sleazy actually happens, but there is a tone of chortling regret over the fact that it didn't.

I have thought a lot about Moore compared to Joyce, whether this book prefigures Joyce or, as Joyce's own letters imply, doesn't. One thought is that this last story would have been very different from Joyce. Simply, when the three male club-man cronies meet and chat at the end, from (1900s) Joyce it would be heavily distanced; he would present them coolly and subtly make them look bad; we would not be encouraged to treat them as morally serious or to feel complicity with them. Whereas Moore, I think, does not think to take such distance - even though he has worked up this rather interesting intertextual / historical textual mode. To a degree this difference can be called a class difference. That is, at this time, Joyce had a keener sense of privilege, oppression, inequality and so on, whereas Moore seems able to be complacent about it.

Despite these reservations I did find the book as a whole actually curiously enjoyable.

I then started reading ... Ian Pindar's short biography of JOYCE (2004).

You, or even I, might think that a biography of James Joyce is the last thing I need to read. But I had always wanted to read this book (since wrongly having the idea, before it was published, that it was a major new Life), and I was recently given it. And oddly though I have now read Joyce's life so many times, I always forget numerous things by the time I go back and read another version.

Pindar routinely commits the single most basic potential error available to Joyce biographers. He cites events and statements from fiction as if they are from life. Now, it is obvious that these fictional words and events *might* be drawn from life. Or maybe in some cases they might not, or they might be distorted, or we could wonder why they were selected and other things weren't. Even if Joyce's books were memoirs and diaries, not works of art, it would *still* be apt to read them carefully and critically, assuming that they don't reliably represent everything, or that others' view of the same event might have been very different. Given that they *are* works of art, plainly this point is redoubled.

This simple point probably doesn't trouble most of this short book's readers, and I continue to read the book and be usefully reminded of things.

i finished the marbled swarm. wrote a goodreads review about it, which doesn’t happen v often https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4827080781

great review, Brad. i wrote a review of 'I Wished', you can read it here.

While I get through Machine Dreams, I want to read something else, so trying to figure that out atm— have a few books that just arrived, but not sure I want to start with any of them just yet, though one of them is a large art-book on freight train graffiti and hobo monikers with some essays in it and I might just flip through that during idle moments.

Where should I start w Patrick Modiano?

I've only read "Paris Nocturne" but I thought it was a good entry point. It has a plot and some sense of momentum to go along with the atmosphere, and it's fairly short.

Cool, thanks!

I finished Ian Pindar's JOYCE. Agreeable to read.

But Pindar's summary of the plot and characters of Finnegans Wake reawakens my suspicion of those. I have long felt that these large elements of that book are clumsy and lumbering and hobble the book while its extraordinary words go about nimbly. Reading Pindar's account (which is not negative at all) confirms this view and repeatedly makes me feel exasperated at the conceptions of structure and character that Joyce had in this last work.

(Could the plot and characters have been made to lumber and to hobble? Or are you suggesting that Joyce was not up to par, saddened, debilitated?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumber
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobble

Bloom was a Jew among the Irish? He carried soap in his pocket (for his wife or himself). That progression (walking) could carry anything ...

KSR not SKR, sorry, and for the general nonsense I post to this thread.)

I finished "The Idiot" by Elif Batuman. It's a long book and I nearly gave up on it because it was still meandering at about 150 pages in, despite the occasionally very funny asides, but it gradually unveils a dramatic conflict that gives it a sense of momentum, a classic "he's just not that into you" kind of conundrum. Currently reading some pieces from a Kurt Tucholsky anthology of short Weimar-era magazine and newspaper pieces called "Berlin! Berlin!".

Youn: it's true that Joyce was debilitated in health by say the mid-1930s, but no, that doesn't explain why he crafted and planned the book as he did much earlier, by say 1925. He believed in FW, thought it was a good idea, and was frustrated by others' inability to get it.

I think that the characters / structure are meant to have a deliberate simplicity - to be 'archetypal' - but no I don't think they're meant to be lumbering in the bad sense that I find them to be.

A basic angle here is the one identified by Wyndham Lewis in 1927: that Joyce typically wrote simple content / structures / stories because it made it easier for him to write complex style. That's not the whole story but there's something in it.

But the FW structures and characters dismay me every time they, yes, lumber into view in an account of the book.

After the Tey book I started a re-read of a Patrick O'Brian naval novel, Treason's Harbor. It's another light entertainment, which seems about all I can handle this week.

I've started Virginia Woolf's JACOB'S ROOM (1922).

So Joyce did most of his work when he was fairly young?
He wanted to start from a known story to experiment with style? In FW the experiment was not successful because ...
I know you admire Flann O'Brien. I've only read At Swim Two Birds but remember being reminded of it when reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness. I wish I were better able to understand what you think is good writing.

have heard of this for years and years---good??

finally finished...wow pic.twitter.com/mnV2Hxcj7g

— julia (@eathedocument) July 15, 2022

julia liked it

grann has a rep for very thoroughly reporting intersting things

haven't read any of it myself

James Joyce wrote DUBLINERS in his 20s, the PORTRAIT around 30. ULYSSES was published on his 40th birthday. FW when he was 57. He died aged 58.

The gap between ULYSSES and FW is the largest and perhaps the longest as experienced. (No answer regarding good writing. Hmmm ...)

FW was always fun to read at random and aloud, but now it's disappeared from local library. If I ever read the whole thing, will also have A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake at hand, or is there something better?

Poster Dow, you could try just reading A SHORTER FW, ed. Anthony Burgess, which contains linking summaries.

That wouldn't be 'reading the whole thing' but it could be a good thing to do first.

As I indicated above, summaries of story are in a sense the problem with FW - they make it seem more banal than it does on the surface.

Poesia Descalza
Vida Rebeldes: Leon Trotski

Early reflections on JACOB'S ROOM:

Lots of material of interest, for interest re Scarborough and its sea front.

VW trying to experiment, to move fiction in a certain direction; to pause and linger over characters, objects, moments; to avoid story in a straightforward way (arguably lots of people had already been doing that - like James? - but VW here is maybe doing it differently.)

The novel seems to be marred, though, by a prevalence of a certain tone that VW nervously had, which can be called: irony, archness, even whimsy. This combines with odd grandiosity and even archaism in eg: her penchant for placing adjectives early in phrases: 'Dim was the evening'. I feel an uncertainty of tone here, or maybe it's just a tone that I don't like or doesn't convince me. It seems to me that this tone remains present in later masterpieces but there is taken up in a whole that is more assured, which allows the irony to do its work without dominating and spoiling the book. Then in ORLANDO the whole book is ironic and comic, which allows the dodgy ironic tone to be ... almost itself ironised, losing all its awkwardness as it becomes simply a comic mode.

I also reflect that the book currently describes a very elite world - Cambridge students and dons - which is fine in itself, but which casts a bad light on eg: VW's (I suppose slightly later) polemics against Arnold Bennett, complaining that one shouldn't describe the clothes and salaries of shopkeepers and so on. VW was making a serious aesthetic critique, but in context of a novel like this it comes across as class exclusion or disdain, which I don't think was what she intended. Put more simply, if you write about Cambridge dons then it doesn't look good to attack people who write about shopkeepers. (But Bennett was a big personality in his own right and doesn't, himself, seriously stand for 'the working classes' or anything like that, here.)

Grant & I Robert Forster
Go-Betweens co founder and co frontman memoir of times leading up to and in the band and after. I've got to a point where the band has split and they've toured as the 2 frontman Forster and the Grant of the title , Mclennan.
Pretty well written and I have been meaning to read this for a while and found it in a charity shop in a pristine copy which my shopping soon put paid to . like bummer.

Killers of the Flower Moon is v good indeed

(It’s the only time me and my partner have bought copies of a book at the same time so we didn’t have to wait for the other person to finish it first.)

Anyway! It’s a v compelling murder mystery that’s also about the Pinkertons and how the FBI started and how white supremacy became ingrained in American policing.

I'm reading Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and not feeling it. The narrators are pompous to beyond absurdity, the gestures towards unspeakable horror are far too vague to be unsettling, and some of the stories are just downright banal.

I wish I could read novels again

Jacob's Room defines "transitional novel" imo

I'm waiting for term to finish (four days!) and then I can start reading novels again.

I'm reading Hannah Gadsby's Ten Steps to Nanette. It does the work of filling in much of the stuff she alludes to in Nanette and Douglas - growing up in rural Tasmania (a mix of wildly beautiful and wildly regressive); her struggles in coming to terms with her sexuality; the extreme loneliness and dysfunction in her personal life; her ASD diagnosis, which led to a refiguring of most of what she'd been through. (There's more but a lot of it's brutal and I don't want to put triggering stuff here).

Much like her stand-up, it's intermittently hilarious but mostly - and very intentionally - confrontational and direct. Trauma runs through her like tree rings and she structures the thing to best show the formation of each layer as its laid down. I'm privileged enough to be able say smug things like 'I feel like I've learned loads from her - about internalised homophobia, about autism' without having experienced any of the brutality, but it's very much the case.

I loved this: Once I understood that I was always going to have difficulty with self-regulation, I stopped worrying about it. Once I am distressed, my moods are not mine to control, but my environment is. I am always working to remove myself from all the cycles and patterns of hostile environments... And I no longer search my behaviours exclusively for revelations about my character, I use my occasions of distress as ways to map the circumstances and environments I move through, and look for ways I can reduce my exposure to distressing situations.

Almost finished Harry Mathews’ collection, ‘Country Cooking & Other Stories.’ First Mathews I’ve read that isn’t a translation, the title story is a gorgeously done parody of stuffy regional French cuisine customs and books, really beautiful and tonally spot on. I’ve always had a deep fondness for the language of cookbooks and used to flip through my mom’s sizable collection when I was a stoned teenager. Great little book.

What is a transitional novel?

Stands athwart literary history and yells, "I am figuring shit out."

She was figuring out if she wanted to be some kind of modernist or else?

Monk decides to be a butterfly or vice-versa.

Did he publish sections early for financial reasons or for feedback? Could he have been ahead of his time but not had the right tools? I was reminded of the student in Ulysses and the ink blots with a bad pen. (He had sympathy with the student because the student was constrained by his surroundings?)

80pp or so into JACOB'S ROOM, similar feelings. Poster Alfred said it's a transitional novel. That's a widespread view, but what does it mean, in the sense: what is the transition between?

'Realism' and 'Modernism'? No, I don't think that catches it. I think it's something like: C19 voice and C20 structure. The 'structure' here is the ability to glide around, elide scenes, focus in and pull back; to tease at the edge of a character's consciousness then move away. It's also something about the non-event nature of the book (so far): the contentment with scene and juxtaposition rather than story. Here we would be in tune with VW's suspicion of narrative drive as expressed in, I think, 'Modern Fiction'.

The 'voice', on the other hand, is to me the thing that holds it back, seems more of a relic. It's hardly a 'realistic' voice. In fact it's often frame-breaking. It often talks of itself in the 1st person - much more, I think, than in VW's next two novels. It has personality and tone. These can cloy. I already mentioned an uncertain excess of irony, archness, whimsy, archaism. I'd add bathos: a regular feature, swooping from 'and so he read Cicero' to 'and she wondered about the price of strawberries', and the like. This is a very familiar VW tone, to be found in some of her greatest novels. My feeling here is that she's overusing it. I wonder also about the effect of the tones on the presentation of character - which is distanced, satirised, mocked. I don't think doing this as much as the novel does works well. Again, I feel that it's too heavily ironic.

So far the novel seems to me a valiant experiment that hasn't entirely worked, held back by what were the idiomatic resources of the author at the time.

"a valiant experiment that hasn't entirely worked" is certainly definition of a transitional novel

(I wonder what Joyce would have made of the Digital Humanities and Woolf of Afghan women's education.)

i was teasing my old pal ben w, a finnegans wake fan-scholar, by claiming that the best place to read it is in quotefragments on twitter, and he snatched the puff from my teasing by saying "yes, yes it is"

this proves joyce wd have loved the digital humanities IMO

Alfred: yes, we can agree that it might be called a transitional novel.

The question I raised, which I find more difficult (though tried to answer), is: transition from what to what?

As I said, perhaps long ago, on a Literary Twitter thread, I think the "FW is best on Twitter" claim holds up rather well.

I suppose you can take Twitter itself out of this and just say "it works best in unexpected fragments which pop up cheerfully and without advertising any particular meaning or context".

we shd persuade ilx poster tim to issue it as a ltd edn box of fortune cookie mottos, calling cards, pencils and such

Now that is the best idea you've had ... all day.

(carried to death and oblivion with an umbrella and surgical mask on a table in a pub in North London)

(What voice could she have affected if not for the whimsy of her class?)

I finished "Double Indemnity" by James M. Cain. Apparently he wrote this fairly quickly in the aftermath of the success of "Postman Always Rings Twice", and it reads like he's returning to the same well. The novelty of using the first-person point of view to narrate a crime has worn off, and this reboot lacks the raffish, demotic voice and atmosphere that gave "Postman" much of its louche energy. This one is more about plot velocity and whodunit-style revelations that keep the reader guessing. Certainly worth a read, but I would rank it a notch lower than its predecessor.

i remember spitting out my coffee when i read this howler from Double Indemnity

I thought about Lola, how sweet she was, and the awful thing that I had done to her. I began subtracting her age from my age. She was nineteen, I'm thirty-four. That made a difference of fiteen years. Then I got to thinking that if she was nearly wenty, that would make a difference of only fourteen years. All of a sudden I sat up and turned on the light. I knew what that meant.

I was in love with her.

Haha, yeah, one of many tonally jarring passages.

Reading poet Simone White's 'or, on being the other woman,' her debut on a "larger" press— Duke U put it out. Interesting book about navigating motherhood, Black femininity, performance, the academy, sex, and lots of interesting prosaic bits about hip-hop, such as an extended riff on Future's psychological landscape and Black masculinity.

xpost haven't read the book, but the movie's always seemed off too, characterization-wise, and even when not in comparison to any of the three versions of Postman I've seen.

Maybe I've missed the off elements of the film. I just love Barbara Stanwyck so much, I can't think of much else when I'm watching it.

I thought about Lola, how sweet she was, and the awful thing that I had done to her. I began subtracting her age from my age. She was nineteen, I'm thirty-four. That made a difference of fiteen years. Then I got to thinking that if she was nearly wenty, that would make a difference of only fourteen years. All of a sudden I sat up and turned on the light. I knew what that meant.
I was in love with her.

This sounds like it's from a Kids In The Hall monologue.

Hankering for some Victorian pulp action so I picked up Guy Boothby's Doktor Nikola. So far the writing is atrocious, hoping the plot will gather enough momentum for me to tolerate this.

It's been a few decades since i read the book Double Indemnity which may have been as part of one of those Pulp fiction anthologies 4 in ones in the Black something series. I think I got it from the local library who got in a few of taht series in the mid 80s . From what I can remember the ending is pretty surreal am I remembering this right, may be from a critical text about the thing but does the wife turn into a giant bird woman. Think this is more a psychological quirk on her part but does she convince herself she has become a crane or something and dress accordingly, swim out to a boat and meet her denouement or am I thinking of something else. The film is more realistic and fatalistic Fred MCMurray and barbara Stanwyck and a different ending.

Haha, wow, that is a surreal ending, but that is from a different book (I wonder which?) Some aspects of the ending did stretch my credulity a bit, and also just the general default assumption of lots of noir fiction that any regular person is capable of committing terrible crimes given the right opportunity.

Fortunately (in this case) I'm not much of a film buff and I've seen very few of the classic film noirs so I'm encountering these books without preconceptions.

This is grotesque!

I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four months of age. He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft spot of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

(The subject of my paraphrase was intended to be "the best idea"; I would treasure finding a ltd edn box.)

I probably shouldn't have mentioned the movie of DE in this case, but will say that The Postman is even more effective as a novel than any of its screen adaptations: in the pages, there's no escape (into visual considerations, other production elements) from that voice---the narrator doesn't seem so much unreliable as just---wrong, misbegotten, almost beyond bad, certainly breaking it, splintering it, sniffing it, chewing it---

DI, rather

> juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

where's this from, in kinda lost in all the cross posting...

anyway, it's a nurse with wound album title.

NWW alb title comes from a quote by Lautréamont, who wrote Goth fave Les Chants de Maldoror.

one does not just chant into maldoror

meanwhile i'm reading solzhenitsyn's cancer ward -- i read abt a third of it when i was a student and then got distracted by my wild young life (lol) and never finished it. 40-odd years later i have begun again at the beginning and got further than i did last time

i'm inclined to feel it's a wee bit DO YOU SEE in its approach to certain things but i will finish it before i comment more fully on this

I finished VW's JACOB'S ROOM. By the end, I had softened. After all my complaints, I liked the book more. Maybe the book changed, maybe I did; became used to it or accepted it. At times I felt: yes, this passage *could* be one of the great literary attempts at a description of the contingency of life in modern London.

I was similar with THE WAVES, long ago. It greatly frustrated me (there was no ILX then to record this fact), then by the very end I felt: I am reading an epic account of the nature of life and death. I am moved.

The 1992 Penguin JACOB'S ROOM I am reading contains notes, some of which are impressive and useful gatherings of fact (a long time before Wikipedia), some of which are hugely excessive editorialising - usually hammering home ideas that "Woolf rejects the male sentence" and "Woolf mocks the arrogance of men". That should have been left to the Introduction, which also holds plenty of it. Notes should be defter and more restrained. The novel itself, as it happens, is often as satirical about women - possibly to excess - as it is about men.

The novel is quite strong, though, on the gradual approach of war, briefly describing battleships going to sea, and so on, as punctuations of the main human action.

Again: in the end, I liked and accepted the novel more than I had thought.

I've started William Cooper, SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE (1950). Breezy, chipper, very lightly / slightly comic, easy to read. A book I've owned for decades, having probably bought it from Ellis Books in Norwich, for 95p - it would have been one of the pretty orange Penguins that they put in the window to attract customers. Reading the books I actually already own occasionally seems a good idea.

The most surprising thing about this book is how sexual it is. The sex is almost all between the lines, yet very heavily implied. I suspect as a young lad - including when I bought the book - most of this would have gone over my head.

I think I brought a Penguin paperback with me to an appointment at UCLA decades ago and the doctor who happened to be English remarked upon it along similar lines (regarding the Penguin and its ability to be recognized).

I own the edition of Maldoror published by Exact Change. I think it was around when Alasdair M. recommended or cited it IIRC and I was reading Denton Welch whose works they also published. I am glad they did.

(One day I will finish/read Maldoror, Infinite Jest, some novels by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses (with the notes), Aesthetic Theory, and more. It is just a matter of being sufficiently deprived.)

It is worth remarking that SCENES (1950) is set in the past - specifically 1939, on the eve of war, despite being a comedy. It's a curiously strong example of the case that some have made, that while "the historical novel" is meant to be set c. 60+ years in the past, you could write one about more recent times if what you wrote about was a historical crux. It's probably a relatively significant novel about that era, in the way that eg Orwell's COMING UP FOR AIR is.

Perhaps the period setting helps to explain how in the world of the novel, a degree of sexual proscription applies - you can have a woman back to your lodgings during the day, but not do anything untoward with her. Yet the main female character has also started going to mysterious bohemian art school parties where people drink and lie on the floor.

This woman, Myrtle, is insistent on marrying the protagonist, and is deflated or alienated whenever it becomes clear that he wishes to avoid this prospect.

I am reminded of Stan Barstow's A KIND OF LOVING, with the difference that this earlier novel is more middle-class than that (or certainly than others like Sillitoe, anyway). The protagonist is a science teacher after all.

I can find something poignant about the straitened, limited world of characters in works like this - who lack the media of later ages, who are forbidden from certain actions, who must remain respectable (no doubt even in their dress) - though having said that, I'm not sure their lives are experienced as that straitened. There is also a gay, or perhaps bisexual, character who has a 17-year-old boyfriend whom he has to see in secret at a cottage.

Characters are all deliberately, physically described, except for the protagonist, who is not visually described at all.

Finished the Simone White book on Friday, loved the way it ends— no epiphanies!

This afternoon finished Jayne Anne Phillips’ MACHINE DREAMS. Don’t understand why she isn’t better known, love her lyrical prose style that often includes dynamic forays into vernacular language.

The 1619 Project Nicole Hannah-Jones ed.
Collection of essays, poetry and short prose detailing black history in the US.
Have had this out for a few months. Need to get into it .
Am finding it interesting and pretty scathing.
I listened to the related podcast when it was new. So good to read the text too.

After Daybreak The Liberation of Belsen Ben Shephard
Good history of the months after the concentration camp fell into British hands. Seems more to have been handed over due to typhus being rampant than actually captured. This shows how things were initially mishandled due to non-Nazi antisemitism and too much red tape.
Thousands more died after the handover.
Very good read so glad I found it.

Dr Nikola strokes a big black cat, which I think might be the origin of that particular supervillain trope?

Small surprise that it is the baddie that attained iconic status in these books, though - the hero is thick as shit. He meets a young viscount, notices that the monk teaching him seems familiar, sees said monk send a telegram to Dr Nikola (whom he'd previously met, and who had introduced himself as a will-to-power creep); then meets said monk in civilian garb scheming with Nikola in London. Our hero gets recruited to accompany the young viscount on a trip to Australia, travels in a carriage with Dr Nikola, gets poisoned, recovers, manages to catch up with the viscount on a ship in southern Europe...and the viscount immediately falls sick after having been given coffee by the fake monk. Protagonist remarks that in the future he would learn that this was the monk's doing, but that at the time he seemed very attentive to the young lad and that even "The Lord of Lies himself" would have been convinced he only wanted to help. C'mon now!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/A_Bid_for_Fortune_frontispiece.jpg/440px-A_Bid_for_Fortune_frontispiece.jpg

😻

Have you read JAP's BLACK TICKETS, table? That was the book of hers that really set me alight - incredibly powerful, lightening-bolt short fictions. Everything of hers I read after that felt disappointingly conventional to me :(

I'm reading Anne Tyler's The Accidential Tourist - it's fine, not sure why it's so acclaimed. Quite startled to find a minor (male) character called Dana Scully, written 8 years before the X Files.

remind me to ask you something when you've done.

Have you read JAP's BLACK TICKETS, table? That was the book of hers that really set me alight - incredibly powerful, lightening-bolt short fictions. Everything of hers I read after that felt disappointingly conventional to me :(

― Piedie Gimbel, Monday, July 25, 2022 2:52 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ugh it's SO GOOD, nothing else compares. i've liked everything else i've read, but yeah, it's much more conventional literary fiction.

xxxpost The Accidental Tourist started well, but got too cute for me, but I may not have stayed with it long enough---did enjoy two of her earlier novels,Searching For Caleb and A Slipping-Down Life, esp. got a kick out of the barefoot boondocks indie singer's zen lyrics, like a pre-parody of early Michael Stipe (published in 1970). Also, Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is supposed to be one of her best, though I haven't read it. If you like her at all, check those out.

said singer is in A Slipping-Down Life.

I must have bought SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE almost 30 years ago, but I read it in two days. It's enjoyable, light, breezy. It perhaps has the structure of farce, in that the same four central characters keep rotating in and out of scenes:

"I went to the cottage to meet Myrtle. When I arrived I found Tom making tea. 'What on earth are you doing here?' I spluttered. 'I'm waiting for Steve', he calmly explained, offering me a prawn sandwich".

Every other scene is like this (which I invented): protagonist Joe Lunn goes somewhere to meet a character and another character turns up. There are only really these four major characters - though there are supporting characters: the schoolboys in the science class; another, imperious and bombastic teacher; an odd authority figure, Robert in Oxford. The pattern gets so repetitive that I did feel that even over a short novel, Cooper (not his real name) had stretched his material too far.

A major motif is the woman (Myrtle) who wants to marry the male protagonist (Joe) - and his resistance, and the endless back & forth, the tortuous winding-down of their relationship over this. She's sad, he's evasive. It's all too realistic, in a way. Again, it probably doesn't need stretching out this long, with so little variation. It makes me wonder, though: did this pattern, the woman seeking marriage and the evasive male, become more pervasive at this point? I think of LUCKY JIM, A KIND OF LOVING, BILLY LIAR. Was there something driving it - such as a possibility of new freedom for unmarried males who couldn't really have had it before, and would thus have settled for marriage?

The novel is curiously, gently metafictional - very casually referring to what it will and won't include as a novel. The last lines are "I reach for a clean new note-book. I pick up my pen". It's quite confounding how an old book can be so metafictional and so conventional and unchallenging.

now reading teenager by bud smith, off to a strong start

― flopson, Sunday, July 10, 2022 11:55 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this book is amazing and insane

Meta-fictional and unchallenging because the author was not sufficiently inspired or did not have the reserves of energy to try anything more? or incapable? or unaware?

No, it's just a light, breezy book, not terribly serious.

I've started another attempt on Joseph Conrad, NOSTROMO (1904), which I didn't make it through - two years ago?

The language doesn't seem as thickly difficult to me this time, though the description of place and cast is dense. I feel that the narration is somehow sly. Perhaps the tone is jaded; at least seasoned.

I'm quite interested, again, in how one major character (so far) is a devotee of Garibaldi's revolution. Indeed the place of Italians in South America seems a feature.

koogs at 2:19 25 Jul 22

remind me to ask you something when you've done.

(re: accidental tourist) go on then...

I warmed to it a little by the end, sort of reminded me of olive kitteridge - difficult person has glimmers of self awareness - with the sharp edges smoothed off. The leary family were amusing if scarcely credible. I wouldn't rush to read another but my wife has downloaded a whole bunch so I might, I might.

mention of Conrad's language reminds me that at one point in Lord Jim a character asks "do you find me mad with the funk?".

Nostromo is dense but worth it. LJ's the Conrad I can't penetrate.

re accidental tourist. not sure it's a question with an answer, maybe something i don't understand about humans, or this human specifically. spoiler tags...

in the penultimate chapter he goes back to his wife. in the final chapter he goes back to muriel. why would you?

anyway, i'd recommend the film, the two leads pretty much nail the characters. i saw it almost by accident - i bought season pass for local 'cinema in the town hall' thing in hemel because there were 3 films in the season i wanted to see and it was cheaper to buy a ticket for everything. fried green tomatoes, crossing delancy, accidental tourist i think were the extra films i saw, all of a kind, really. ironically i can't remember the films i specifically wanted to see...

seeing the film prompted buying the book and the book led to quite a few more although i do confuse them somewhat. A Slipping Down Life is a standout. and i remember the one with the puppet theatre. Morgan's Passing i have, Ladder of Years. Tin Can Tree. The Clock Winder of the more recent books (spoiler - contains no actual clock winding). more.

Damn, Teenager looks fantastic.

why would you?

do you mean his general indecision or why he would go back to muriel specifically? dissertations could probably be written on the choices he makes, or has made for him, but it's pretty clear about why he makes his final decision.

my question is... is it mayson or maykon?

yeah final decision is the more obvious of the two, it's the chicane i think i have the problem with, the *two* changes of mind.

and a hard c iirc

For even more Tyler, also take a look at xpost Searching For Caleb, and I guess Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, the one I haven't read that rode a surge of acclaim.

Not exactly a "what are you reading" but: I somehow missed Hernan Diaz on the Tin House podcast this month discussing Trust (a book I loved, and can't wait to re-read)

I just requested that yesterday and am looking forward to it. Now reading Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, which is very cosmopolitan (meaning multinational, not chic or whatever else). It seems strange that the EU and the International Criminal Court are in Belgium and the Netherlands. Perhaps they seem neutral and are too homely and small for grand ambitions. Or their perch on the edge of the continent ...

I read Philip K. Dick's first novel, SOLAR LOTTERY (1955).

Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond

Currently reading City of Thieves, by David Benioff. A story set in Leningrad during the siege. So far so good. Benioff took a lot of heat as one of the writers, directors and showrunners of Game of Thrones, but this novel zings along.

Finished Ben Shephard After Daybreak the Liberation of Belsen 1945 which was really good and very infoprmative.

Started Michael Lewis The Fifth Risk which I picked up in a charity shop earlier this week.
It's his look into how the US government works and the source book for Adam Conover's series the G Word. Watched that a few weeks ago.
Not got very far into it so far but looks promising.

still reading the Mother Of Invention by Katrine Marcal
still finding some interesting things in this but wish it was argued better instead of continually trying to hit the reader with the agenda in the way it is. Have said before would like to read a book on this subject which was argued better. Not so much beating one around teh head with it. I think there are subtler ways of doing that.

CITY OF THIEVES (1983) was one of my favourite Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.

Finished part one (100pp) of NOSTROMO. Much scene-setting, a narrative mode of "and typically X would happen": "Don Pedro would be seen driving his donkey cart along the coast with the Senora", "it was said that Don Carlos was a man who knew a rifle as well as he knew a peseta", etc - the sort of thing you might expect for the first 5 pages, here massively distended.

My impression is that the rest of the novel may get more particularised in the narrative's present, whenever that is.

Conrad seems savvy about politics, and it's remarkable to think that he wrote with authority about Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. Perhaps no writer till then had had such range.

maybe melville? tho his authority is wildly fantastical (and more based round the pacific islands than asia): in any case, both spent decades at sea, is the key to this

I read two slim and deeply contrasting volumes:

"The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson" (1944) by Gerald Kersh could hardly be more of a man's book. being a series of barrack-room discussions about the titular Bill, who'd died or was dying trying to save lives in bombed buildings. The novel is really just a delineation of an ideal manhood at a very particular point in time and interesting in those terms, but I couldn't say I'd recommend it. Kersh is usually a bit nastier than this, but this one's a wartime morale-booster and suffers for it. It's absolutely filthy with racism, too though I'd guess that's society's racism rather than author being more racist than was normal at the time.

"Being Here is Everything" (2016) by by Marie Darrieussecq (tr. Penny Hueston 2017), which is a beautiful and melancholy life of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, drawing heavily from (apparently plentiful) documentary sources. Her story skips by in a few relatively simple strokes and is pretty good at laying out various obstacles and indignities suffered by Becker in her too-brief life. I think the book wants me to be more interested in Rilke than I am, and he looms large-ish, I guess at least in part because the documentary sources by and about him are certainly plentiful. It's good.

Maybe both of them are dong some idealising of gendered behaviours; the Kersh obviously is, I'm not sure about the Darrieussecq.

Hi!

Been reading this thread for a while - strangely enough from a room pretty much above Ellis Books as mentioned by Pinefox - and thought I'd join in.

I'm halfway through Jim Ottewill's Out of Space: How UK Cities Shaped Rave Culture. It's a pretty readable account of exactly what the title says. Nothing in it is particularly groundbreaking but as an overview of the last 40 years of UK club culture it is fine.

Two Dennis Cooper novels (Guide and I Wished) arrived in the post today so I'll make a start on them over the weekend.

Welcome! Thanks for mention of the Ottewill, think I'm about to read Peter Shapiro's dance history Turn The Beat Around, which includes late-50s discotheque scenes, new to me.

Amazon thinks I might be interested in Nathalie Léger's trilogy or sequence of books about Barbara Loden and other female media milestone figures, and I am---are they good?

City of Thieves is very gripping but I found it a little bothersome how much of the events in it are borrowed from Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt, which is theoretically non-fiction but is probably 80% invented.

Turn the Bear Around is so so so good - maybe my favourite book about clubbing (alongside Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life). Enjoy!

It's pretty uncanny that an ILB poster should live above Ellis Books.

It's not the best bookshop I've ever been to, not the best stock, and probably not even as good as it was. Last time I couldn't even find anything to buy though I wanted to. But perhaps it's the most evocative bookshop I can think of, or the one for which I have most sentiment.

Many years ago, Mrs Ellis would always be in the backroom, always with Radio 4 on, and would usually give me a random discount, quite unasked for, whatever I was buying. It was as if she knew me, but she didn't.

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi
The Devil in the Flesh, Raymond Radiguet
Manhood: A Journey From Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility, Michel Leiris

Easily the best three books I've read back-to-back. What a summer.

The best book shops smell like paper.

Turn the Bear Around is so so so good - maybe my favourite book about clubbing

Keen to read about the bear community's underappreciated contribution to the scene.

I have picked up Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19 which just dropped in pback with a gr8 afterword interview with Jennifer Hodgson. V much looking forward to - Pond was such a treat.

Also Rookie, the new selected poems by Caroline Bird, is a hoot.

My request for Trust by Hernan Diaz was not filled, but I requested some other books including a novel by PKD called Man in the High Castle. I have Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown checked out to start next and just finished The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu-Byeong Mo, which ended with a scene of (surreal?) violence, which reminded me of the end of Parasite and which seems to be characteristic of popular contemporary Korean film these days. The book also has cultural references that I think I at least partially understand and which might carry some of the resonance of the book. I will have to find Trust somewhere else.

Sorry, her surname is Gu and her given name is Byeong Mo.

keith ball - strange curves, counting rabbits, and other mathematical explorations

recreational math book intended for high school students. but fun for me to read, too. learned about ISBN codes last night

finished 'teenager' by bud smith. i don't know if everyone on ILB would like it (it contains some pretty gratuitous violence) but i really enjoyed it. is there a name for the microgenre of contemporary novel that contains atticus lish 'preparations for another life' and nico walker 'cherry' (and now this)? they all have this very similar prose style, a salt-of-the-earth narrator who speaks in short poetic homespun sentences that evoke a wide-eyed grandeur

Halfway through NOSTROMO. Quick observations:

Conrad maintains this curious mode of narrative in which a single scene is ongoing for many pages ('thus the salon continued that night at the Casa Gould') while he digresses away from it, in and out of it, via characters ('as for Don Jose, he had commanded many men on sea and land ...'). A combination of 'narrating the present' and a much more generalising, rangy approach to past time. I wondered if this had an analogue in Proust.

The character of Nostromo is fascinating. He is at once brilliant, competent, mysteriously talented - and naive, and swayed by his desire for recognition by others. His real name is Gian' Battista - he's an Italian, in South America. A foreigner: a Latin but not Hispanic. His name 'Nostromo' is in effect the name of the colonists: 'our man', 'the indispensable fellow!' it's repeatedly said - though it does also have the flavour of a heroic, mysterious name like Zorro. And he is also the Capataz of the Cargardores - the captain of the stevedores, effectively the Duke of the Dockers. So he's involved with organized labour in some way, though I think not in the unionised way we would recognise, and these labourers seem to be on the side of those in power - of 'law & order' anyway.

The question of which political side is more virtuous - those currently in power in the town, or others - is cloudy. The veteran Garibaldian seems to retain some virtue.

It's fascinating that every time Nostromo re-enters the novel he is reintroduced, as if he's a mysterious stranger. 'A rider was walking with his silver grey mare, lighting a cigar in the dark' - only a couple of sentences later does Conrad tell us it's Nostromo. And he reintroduces him with repeated epithets: 'the Genoan sailor'; 'looking like a Mediterranean sailor' - over and over, to a degree he doesn't do for other characters.

The atmosphere reminds me slightly of a Western - maybe even a Spaghetti Western.

A scene in which Nostromo and another character sail out into the dark sea at night (I'm still in the midst of it, no idea how it ends) is like a scene from SF or Gothic - a vision of eternity, the sublime, the void. A remarkable extremity of setting from Conrad. You could compare his novel in some ways to MIDDLEMARCH - a portrait of a town and its economy and characters (and maybe that's something that F.R. Leavis saw in it) - but Eliot, at least in that work, didn't take us to such extreme places.

Jean Giono's Melville, Josephine Wilkinson's Louis XIV: The Power and the Glory , and John Rechy's After the Blue Hour.

I just finished Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. It feels like an attempt to consolidate the strengths of Wolf in White Van but also to branch out in new directions. Both novels deal with traumatic events and their aftermath, and both follow the writing dictum to always know more about your characters than you reveal to the reader. In both cases Darnielle tantalizes with glimpses of something terrible but doles out the particulars in dribs and drabs to keep up the suspense. But in a way the real meat of the book is the more ordinary, day-to-day stuff that happens: the slow and incomplete process of healing, the guilt and shame experienced by the survivor, the necessity of repressing trauma. This book has a more elaborate structure and a larger cast of characters. In some ways it feels like a transitional novel.

Yeah---the transition, the reaching continues through Devil House, especially the last part, which I have misgivings about, especially the way it makes me rethink much of the novel up to that point. But yeah, the day-to=day process, there's even a character who seems like a genius of the quotidian, and certainly the evocation of time and place, of setting and what it does to lives lived then and there, is riveting (more focus on a single area than in UH, more like Wolf... in that sense, but more outdoors-indoors than that one)
I need to re-read both of those, but right now I have the hangnail impression that what he does best, fading in and out on people in the middle of something, is, aside from WIWV, overall less effective in the long fiction than in his best songs, also those of Dylan (esp. mid-60s) and Steely Dan: no matter how much space you leave in the novel, there are a lot of connections, framework at least, for all those pages of cold print---music doesn't have to do that.

But WIWV is astonishing---still need to read Master of Reality.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to Devil House, will probably wait for the paperback, or see if it shows up at the library. I’d like to read Master of Reality too at some point. There is an emotional core to the writing that feels real and carries me through the more mechanical business. Tbh I’m not really that familiar with the music apart from a few songs.

Read both I Wished and Guide by Dennis Cooper over the past few days. I've read the George Miles cycle out of order but I'm not sure if that makes any difference to it at all. Especially as I've read and listened to enough interviews with Cooper over the years to understand his approach to the books a series and the role that George plays in his work.

I preferred I Wished which is, for him, a pretty spare novel. There's the usual Cooper obsessions but it felt a little less weary than Guide which is all out non-stop sex/murder/characters flatly saying "I'm so fucked up" all the time. Having read the bulk of his work now, I think I might actually like Cooper more as a figure than as a novelist.

Still, was interesting to read them both a few weeks after finishing a re-read of 1982, Janine.

Last night I started High Lonesome by Barry Hannah, the first collection of his I've picked up.

the order of the george miles cycle doesn’t matter yes, except that as a reader i saw guide as the total massing of all of the tropes he laid out in the previous books before they get exploded in period (guide is prob my least fave of the cycle, my faves are period and try)

annie ernaux - a girls story

I've been camping and hiking for a couple of weeks. I managed to read two books during that time, even though I was falling asleep almost as soon as dark fell. I read True Grit, Charles Portis and Maigret Mystified, Georges Simenon. There's really nothing much to say about either one.

Strange to say True Grit was the only Portis novel I hadn't yet read. I was mainly impressed by how exceptionally well-thought out the Coen brothers's film adaptation was. The Coens discarded the least cinematic and least important elements, but still managed to give the book a full and complete realization, much as John Huston did for The Maltese Falcon. The congruence between the book and film was nearly perfect.

They pulled off the same rare trick for their No Country adaptation IMO.

Now I am reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. My copy is a paperback tie-in promo for the Blade Runner 2049 film, so the cover prominently displays "Blade Runner" in bright red where the title normally would be, while doing as much as it can to hide the real title in a smaller point size and in pale gray. As for the book, I am finding it less interesting than what I've read of his other work, but it's suitably bizarre so it fits in well with his oeuvre.

my copy was a tie in for the original and was the same. my ebook copy i changed to have the Japanese cover, because i could.

https://i.redd.it/bnxp0a3xyocz.jpg

That is splendid, and the sheep's little smile makes it perfect---now looking at lots of pictures of sheep:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sheep&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiX8-S9w6v5AhWOj2oFHQArCDkQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1215&bih=567&dpr=1.13

still reading the Mother Of Invention by Katrine Marcal
still finding some interesting things in this but wish it was argued better instead of continually trying to hit the reader with the agenda in the way it is. Have said before would like to read a book on this subject which was argued better. Not so much beating one around teh head with it. I think there are subtler ways of doing that.

― Stevolende, Friday, 29 July 2022 08:55 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just started this and I see what you mean, she does keep on hammering the same points over and over. Also little annoyances keep jumping out at me - 'the first circle was probably drawn in the sand with a stick' orly? I'll keep reading though as the examples and stories are interesting enough.

Palaces For The People How TO Build A More Equal & United Society Eric Klinenberg
book looking at the importance of social infrastructure in society. I caught a webinar with the writer last week and ordered the book through interlibrary loan and it came through on Tuesday. For some reason it got issued to me but somehow not officially checked out , not sure how taht happened. I got home and it was still showing up as arrived. I forgot it was in my bag when i was in another library and the buzzer went off when I left. Took it in to check it out officially todayl.
Anyway, enjoying it . He covered a lot of what I've read in the talk last week but it is in more depth here. Talking about the importance of libraries as social hubs etc and the other dimensions tahn it just being a place for borrowing and reading books.
I found out after ordering it that I have a book he cowrote with Aziz Ansari called Modern Romance which I picked up a few weeks ago too.
I'm about 1/3rd of the way through this and enjoying it.

Michael Lewis The Fifth Risk
his look into the various strands of govt run agencies etc and why and how people took jobs there . Very interesting. Source book for Adam Conover's teh G Word where he looks into the same subject matter now, this book was triggered by trump coming to power without a transition group which was a break in tradition about how things were handed over. & I think has had a widespread consequence which is hopefully being overcome.

Hermann Burger - Brenner

This is a novel but there is very little dialogue, its more like a set of recollections of the narrator's life (based on the author, this was published in the late 80s, it was set to be a quartet of books but he only completed one hundred more pages of the 2nd book before he died by his own hand) set to the page. It avoids being Proust -- as it lacks the panorama-like views, and there aren't any developed characters bar the author's inner monologue -- and it also avoids being Bernhard as it has a very resigned mood without the anger and humour. Its someone writing at the very nervous edge of their life.

What it does get across is that post-industrial, central European, rich society. One of business, cars, lush-ness - he plays the son of a family of cigar makers, and the book is full of digressions on the cigar (as much as Melville talks about whales) - contrasting it with a poverty of spirit, of nervous wrecks at the end of their lives, but one of which is transmitted in that cool style. But mastering prose doesn't mean you've mastered your life. In the end you do run out of pages.

One of the best things I'll read all year but I wouldn't recommend it unless you heard about it from somewhere else.

"Being Here is Everything" (2016) by by Marie Darrieussecq (tr. Penny Hueston 2017), which is a beautiful and melancholy life of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, drawing heavily from (apparently plentiful) documentary sources. Her story skips by in a few relatively simple strokes and is pretty good at laying out various obstacles and indignities suffered by Becker in her too-brief life. I think the book wants me to be more interested in Rilke than I am, and he looms large-ish, I guess at least in part because the documentary sources by and about him are certainly plentiful. It's good.

― Tim, Friday, 29 July 2022 bookmarkflaglink

She is great. I really like The Phantom Husband, heard of that book and will try and pick it up sometime.

I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It thoughtfully addresses the moral problems it posed, but the morality which had relevance in this world was fairly commonplace and that which dealt with novelties like humanlike androids had little relevance outside of the imaginary confines of the story. On the other hand, it didn't need to be profound for it to be entertaining and that was enough for me.

I've been reading "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Its a longish, continuous work of prose fiction so I guess it meets the definition of a novel, though it has only the very loosest notion of plot. More a loosely connected sequence of reveries. It has a blurb from Elizabeth Hardwick on the back cover, and if anything it reminds me a bit of her novel, "Sleepless Nights". There are some very lovely passages in the Stephen Mitchell translation.

Noted both of those (was already interested in the Hardwick, after reading New Yorker profile, but this association is a good reminder). Thanks.

Where we stand:class matters Bell Hooks,
still working through whatever of bell hooks books i can get my hands on . This has been on request for months buit sitting i a warehouse connected to a library elsewhere in teh county. I was told a few months back taht it would eventually get to me and finally had to get somebody rung so it could actually make its way to me.
So I'm halfway through it and its bell talking about her poor upbringing and class in America. So quite memoir based but tying in to comment on societal structure.
I'm enjoying it anyway.

Nikki Sixx The Heroin Diaries
a recent acquisition of a book I have seen around for a few years. Quite interesting and scathing, watching somebody's heroin addicted dodgy behaviour being noted by himself , now with commentary from those he was hanging around with. That means band members, family and friends 20 years later.
Found it cheap and it was something I thought might be an interesting read. Now seeing what his musical tastes were so obviously Motley Crue must be a band worth checking out, yeah?

The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra - He is a good writer, and it will be a pleasure to read the rest of his books. I am only partially through the first story (cursory reaction: need to think about characteristics of totalitarian regimes vs. "free" societies in science fiction or social satire; short stories should probably be read through without a break).

I'm starting into Black Wings Has My Angel, Elliot Chaze.

Always been curious about that one.

It certainly starts out strongly.

I love Black Wings Has My Angel!

yeah great book

Just finished, and loved, Tehanu. It seems like one of the greatest ever examples of a book that's deliberately, perversely, in opposition to what its readers might have expected -- but that turns out to be the perfect approach.

Yes, high five!

Currently reading Alan Garner's Red Shift, I can see why it's so acclaimed but it's not quite working for me. Tom in particular is, well, quite annoying. Yes he's only a teenager and has every right to be but that doesn't make it easier to read.

I finished Joseph Conrad's NOSTROMO (1904) - a remarkable, rich novel, which becomes exciting.

I started James Rebanks, ENGLISH PASTORAL (2020) - a non-fictional book about sustainable farming.

I seem to have been reading Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake for as long as it would take to build a crumbling Gothic castle.

Gavin Lambert's The Goodbye People.

I started listening to Rachel Kushner's book of essays (or is it a memoir?) The Hard Crowd, read by the author. The first piece (about the Baja motorcycle race) was such a distilled universe, I need time to process it before I go any further. I hope the remaining pieces reach the same heights, and at the same time I sort of don't because it would be exhausting! But she has definitely earned a new fan.

Also I really want to listen to the motorcycle piece again with my mom

Allan Jones Can't Stand Up For Falling Down
Melody Maker scribe then editor and founder of uncut magazine's anthology of anecdotes about dealing with various musicians etc.
Quite good if you like this kind of thing.

I have owned multiple copies of Gavin Lambert's The Slide Area in multiple houses over multiple decades, but never actually read it... perhaps I should

Finished a few books over the past few weeks, including some chaps (most notable being by a young Indigenous writer to watch out for, Hataałiinez Wheeler). These included:

Rabih Alameddine, The Wrong End of the Telescope
Piero Heliczer, a purchase in the white botanica
Steve Malmude, The Bundle: Selected Poems

The Heliczer was super interesting from a poetic and cultural standpoint— he was a schizophrenic who collaborated at times with Warhol, Gerard Malanga, George Whitman, the Schneemans, etc. He fathered children all over the world. And his poetry was often quite good— a fine mix of concrete and abstract language congealing into sort of dream-like, surprising poems. Worth checking out.

Also the Alameddine was great, he is one of our best living novelists as far as I'm concerned— The Wrong End deals with a trans woman doctor who goes to the island of Lesbos during the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015. It's wrenching but also episodic, and thus pretty easy to read.

Oh yeah---had forgotten name & title, but your description of Alameddine's novel reminds me: some intriguing reviews, all favorable.

Been reading Brazilian (Giovana Madalosso), Catalan (Jaume Cabré) and Portuguese (Mário Zambujal) authors, but none of the books I read have been translated into English so have nothing to contribute here.

Just put myself through a re-read of The Information by Martin Amis for reasons I can't quite fathom. It is very bloated and not very good.

Moving on to either Luke Cassidy's Iron Annie or Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan, which comes highly blurbbed by Anne Enright and given that I've spent much of the past few months reading (and pretty much loving) everything Enright has published I might opt for that.

recent reads:

Sarah Schulman - After Delores
Sesshu Foster - World Ball Notebook
Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher
Adolfo Bioy Casares - The Invention of Morel and Other Stories

& just finishing up Rafael Chirbes' Cremation

I am reading A Good Little School, about Jefferson County (Colorado) Open School. It's an "alternative" school that I had the good fortune to attend back in the 70s. It's still going. Their educational approach is remarkable. The book is written by an educator and takes a professional approach, with lots of input from students, staff and parents (which is very consistent with the school's philosophy). Not for everyone, maybe, but it's an examination of a way of educating the whole person that could/should serve as a model.

zak, did you like the Foster? i think he's incredible

Yes, he's one of my favorites! City of the Future (in particular) is one of the books I am always trying to convince people I know to read.

How is the Chirbes?

I picked up 'World Ball Notebook' in 2017 on a whim at a lovely shop in SF, was completely blown away, and have read a book of his ever year since then, including the novels— I had some trouble stomaching Atomik Aztex but it was worth it in the end, plus my copy was inscribed (twice!) to some old friend of his who taught at Berkeley and passed away.

I read most of Atomik Aztex stuck in an airport -- appropriately claustrophobic and bleak and grotesque. I'm glad I read it, but it's not one I return to like his others. Almost an opposite reading experience.

I have mixed feelings about Chirbes' Cremation. It's the first of his I've read and I may try another. The late-stage capitalism in post-Franco Spain context is not something with which I am familiar, and some of those setting details are engrossing. It's a character study: dense internal monologue chapters alternating between different characters, mostly members of one family, intertwined perspectives, and I ended up liked the ambling, pace ("understated plot," maybe). Has some *underworld* plot elements and stock tropes that I found a little too prestige TV for my tastes.

I finished Black Wings Has My Angel last night. It was like a master class in how to write a crime noir novel. The narration is carefully pared down to a series of vivid, highly concrete details, through which the story takes on a kind of hyper-realism. That approach also allows the story to incorporate lots of (male) fantasy elements about sex, violence and alcohol while retaining its vivid sense of realism. It's a neat trick and this one was of far higher quality than the run of the mill "booze, bullets & broads" crime noir.

Afterwards I read about the first 60 pages of Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz. She is obviously a natural-born sensualist, a self-dramatist and a romantic, but all that fits perfectly with her being a child of Hollywood insiders (on the 'talent' side of the business, not the 'investor' side) and so the overall effect charming rather than annoying.

I finished reading James Rebanks, ENGLISH PASTORAL (2020). It comprises 3 parts: one describing life on his grandfather's old hill farm; one describing new, industrial / agribusiness practices; one describing what the author is now trying to do with the farm - which is focused on creating spaces for wildlife.

The main message is that industrial farming, chemicals, homogenization, efficiency, etc, which have produced more food and made it cheaper, have been bad for the land, for wildlife and plants, and are not sustainable. I am highly sympathetic to this view and glad that this farmer has reached it. However, I am not sure that he squares the circle in terms of marrying sustainability to productivity. That is: if we agree to drop the pesticides etc and become more traditional, diverse and nature-friendly, won't farming be less productive and will it be able to feed people?

Perhaps it will. He talks of the importance of local food. Again I am sympathetic in principle. Perhaps in fact the issue is cost. Perhaps sustainable farming *can* produce enough food, but it would or should be more expensive. Then, of course, many people would say that food is already too expensive - especially the way prices are now going up. It is probably a grim irony that food prices are now rising but not for the good reasons that this farmer would like them to.

I am quite convinced by this farmer's account of how good his new farming is for nature. I support him. I worry that even these good efforts will be overtaken by things far beyond his control, like climate breakdown.

The book is mostly well written, sometimes 'poetic' about nature, and makes its arguments convincingly. The rhetoric can, though, be more repetitive than it needs to be, and the book thus probably could have been slightly shorter than 280 pages.

That is: if we agree to drop the pesticides etc and become more traditional, diverse and nature-friendly, won't farming be less productive and will it be able to feed people?

One possibility is that slow food production could be larger proportion of GDP: more could be devoted to producing essentials carefully.

I am enjoying the mordant gallows humor in The Tsar of Love and Techno. It is strange to think that some part of it takes place in the 1990s and early 2000s, which may sound like ancient history for some posters. There is a time warp to living in Siberia and one related perhaps to COVID and its fallout.

In KSR's Pacific Edge, everyone (in OC) can have a vegetable garden rather than a swimming pool in their backyard.

To address the question of affordability, I think the ideal would be global informed subsistence farming and sociocultural intelligence and government policy to favor local consumption and doing without where temptation is socially constructed. Information on farming practices could come from many sources.

it's also important to remember that as food options have grown in western countries, so has the amount of energy needed to transport those goods to stores. simultaneously, food waste has grown to be an immeasurably large problem.

Related to what youn notes is the fact that the spectacle of *excess* and *abundance* is also socially constructed, and can be changed— what if people began rejecting out-of-season produce as wasteful and shitty, because it is? No one needs strawberries year round!

Representation Stuart Hall.
seems to be a course text book but is filled with comment on the act of Representation from hall and various authors he has selected.
I find the subject pretty interesting, it covers/overlaps several other disciplines I'm interested in Semiotics/linguistics etc etc
I think I may have got myself stuck with too many thick books for the time of year. A bit hot to engage with things as deeply as i would like. But looking forward to get further into this.

finished Michael Lewis the Fifth Risk
Which I have come across other media tied into. I'm remembering the ending subject of working out drift on shipwrecked etc objects/people at sea from a couple of places from a couple of years ago. Listening to so many podcasts etc that I'm not remembering exactly what came from where from a couple of years back. Just that it presumably did tie in to either this book , which came out in the wake of Trump taking over and misusing the government departments, neglecting them, understaffing them etc etc either this book or the person talked about in it.
Adam Conover has used the book as the source for his latest tv series The G-Word which was also pretty interesting.

Think I am either going to read The Book of V: Opening Pandora's Box by Catherine Blackledge which I inherited fro a girlfriend 16 years ago but never finished or go into I Am Damo Suzuki which again I started but didn't finish this time about 2 years ago.

I read Andrew Holleran’s Kingdom of Sand for my book club, and almost everyone hated it when we discussed it (these are all gay men). They thought that he hadn’t progressed psychologically from the adoration of beauty and the homosexual self-hatred he wrote about in 1978’s Dancer From the Dance, his first and most acclaimed novel.

It really seemed to strike a nerve. It was about the slow diminishment of the narrator’s life as a single gay man in his 60s moving to rural Florida to take care of his dying parents, and about his sexual encounters involving bathrooms and adult bookstores in rural locations (which was definitely a thing for gay men in the past), and I think people thought it was too focused on loss of dignity. Well, of course it was, that was what it was about.

“One of the great appeals of Florida has always been the sense that the minute you get here you have permission to collapse.”

“There is a delicate undercurrent beneath get-togethers among singles on holidays that mingles the comfort of having a friend to relieve your isolation with the realization that the two of you have nobody else.”

It was a story that ruminated and circled back so many times to his isolation and sexual frustration that it was hard to get bearings on where you were located in the narrative. But I liked it, it was kind of funny, was very honest about where he was coming from, and was a realistic portrayal of a particular historical subset of gay men

Andrew Holleran is now 79, so pretty old, and I think that this story is about his generation. Edmund White is even older, 82, and writes and talks about the same stuff

I have appreciation for both White and Holleran, but it’s always because of their early achievements

What are their best books?

I think for Andrew Holleran it’s Dancer From the Dance from 1978, and for Edmund White it’s A Boy’s Own Story from 1982 (the first in a trilogy that included The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The farewell Symphony)

they are period pieces, though

I started Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887): the first Sherlock Holmes story, in fact a short novel.

A reminder of Dr John Watson's past as a surgeon to the army in the empire; and Holmes also is first encountered at a medical school. In fact for good or ill I've found myself reading this slightly through the lens of the first episode of SHERLOCK, with, yes, Benedict Cumberbatch.

I find the novels generally uncharming and overextended -- it's a shame that Hound of the Baskervilles is so well-known, as the mystery is too obvious and the book as a whole is quite dull. "Sign of Four" is the best -- there's a jaunty penny dreadful vibe and the flashbacks are more fun.

(As such Sign of Four kind of works through the lens of Young Sherlock Holmes)

What are their best books?

― dow, Thursday, August 11, 2022 10:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think for Andrew Holleran it’s Dancer From the Dance from 1978, and for Edmund White it’s A Boy’s Own Story from 1982 (the first in a trilogy that included The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The farewell Symphony)

― Dan S, Thursday, August 11, 2022

I've been on a White kick. His memoir about reading is lovely, and his last few novels, though minor, are delights. I'd say start with Our Young Man.

As for Holleran, he wrote a slim novel about melancholy and Washington DC and Henry Adams called Grief; one of the decade's best.

> A reminder of Dr John Watson's past as a surgeon to the army in the empire

afghanistan as well, which suited the tv updating

must've seen a hundred versions of HoftheBs but i still couldn't tell you the reveal. maybe i should read it and it'll finally click.

Because of its recent mention on ILB I picked up a cheap used copy of Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann and took it on a camping trip. The slice of history it documents is well worth the telling, especially because the history of native american tribes after the wars of extirpation were over and the remnants of the tribes were swept into reservations has been so thoroughly buried and ignored.

My edition is front-loaded with pages full of ecstatic blurbs from reviewers in a couple dozen USA Sunday newspapers about how "taut" and "suspenseful" the book is, which only confirms how such reviewers hand out superlative praise with wild abandon. The prose is good workmanlike journalistic writing, but nothing amazing.

I'm still reading Eve's Hollywood, but piecemeal. It lends itself to that treatment, because it's just a collection of short vignettes.

I finished A STUDY IN SCARLET. The name derives from blood: 'Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it' (49). Unusually poetic, but oddly inaccurate, as life is not colourless but, most people would say, colourful.

The book is very oddly structured: halfway through it turns from Holmes to a 55-page story, narrated by an omniscient voice (not Dr Watson) with nothing to do with the London events (and often with a prim Victorian style that is, as in the descriptions of the girl Lucy Ferrier, too close to parody), about a feud and murder among Mormons in Utah. This must have seemed very exotic in 1887 (indeed it still does). But it all makes the story rather askew from the Detective Club point of view of being 'fair to the reader', etc - there is no way that a reader could guess at any of this material. There is very little hint even that Holmes has begun to investigate it.

The murderer is taking a righteous revenge for which he has waited many years. It's also absurd, then, that his method is to give his victims a 50/50 chance by giving them a choice of pills, one containing poison, and taking the other himself. Plainly this could completely defeat the project of revenge, except that he believes that the choice of pill is dictated by 'Providence' (p.153).

The earlier pages on the meeting of Holmes and Watson, and the general experience of watching Holmes investigate a crime, are appealing, but past the halfway mark the book's direction is rather unexpected.

i read study in scarlet at school and i think not since: at the time i too was struck and a bit baffled by the long digression into mormon feuds (not sure i'd even heard of mormons at that point), and also (as a schoolchild interested in chemistry) fascinated that there existed a "great alkali plain", which seemed like too much alkali

Maybe life is a colorless skein to the speaker: Holmes, I suspect.

From Oxford Languages:

skein
/skān/
Learn to pronounce
noun
a length of thread or yarn, loosely coiled and knotted.
a tangled or complicated arrangement, state, or situation.
"the skeins of her long hair"
a flock of wild geese or swans in flight, typically in a V-shaped formation

learn to pronounce!!

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (Chechens and also perhaps Russians around the turn of the century; the intersection of globalism, Stalinism, Islam, nationalism, censorship, and perhaps also this artist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Zakharov-Chechenets; just started so perhaps many things; now the scene is a hospital during wartime)

Oh yeah, reminds me of seeing his latest, Mercury Pictures Presents, about refugees in 1940s Hollywood: local library has it, maybe I'll get it there.

I'm now reading H.G. Wells, THE INVISIBLE MAN (1897).

Two things strike me. One, the anger of the Invisible Man - a figure who seems to be dangerous not because he has a plan for world domination, just because he's furious with everyone. Two, the rural English setting (lots of Sussex village dialect), so typical of Wells - in that each of the major SF narratives (except Dr Moreau? haven't read that yet) seem to start from such a contented (suburban Surrey in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS), respectable (local worthies in THE TIME MACHINE) or bucolic (Kent countryside in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON) English world into which the new technology or nova violently intrudes.

Remarkable career to have produced 5 foundational SF narratives by about 1901 (time travel, alien invasion, space exploration, superpowers, mad scientist experimenting with genetics), then, I believe, largely left SF behind and gone into other literary modes.

A long time ago a cousin brought a vinyl pressing of the infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast to my house and told me the blatant lie that Orson Welles was his son. I believed this to be a fact until I was 13. A humiliation I never really fully recovered from! Was just reading his wiki and struck by how shagging around he did for someone who wasn't in the best of health. And his early years were rougher than I expected.

A bunch of holiday reads.

Lee Child - Tripwire. My second Reacher! It's crap but still.

Harriet Walter - Lady Macbeth. An actor's account of playing the role (alongside Tony Sher). Full of insight.

Edward St. Aubyn - Never Mind/Bad News. The first two Patrick Melrose novels. Literature as revenge? I'd started reading the first before realising these were largely autobiographical. The distilled rage of the first book makes it more effective. The second, a book about the phenomenology of addiction, loses its way a bit.

Ed Guerro - Do The Right Thing. BFI book about the film.

Han Kang - The Vegeterian. This hit me pretty hard. A book about resistance, states of grace. The book it most reminded me of was The Life and Times of Michael K by Coetzee.

Simon Callow - Being An Actor. I sort of expected to hate this. It's full of self-regard (and loathing) but it's hugely insightful in places.

Bohumil Hrabal - I Served the King of England. A garrulous picaresque. Huge fun and increasingly moving. Also, the second book in as many days about decorating women's bodies with flowers (albeit real ones, as compared to the vegeterian, and not exploitative).

Currently reading Cicely Berry's The Actor and the Text and in a weird echo of the pinefox, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Wow, spelt vegetarian wrongly twice there (and missed a capital).

Speaking of weird echoes, I am reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems and took a photo of one I particularly liked this morning; twelve hours later, an acquaintance whom I follow on Instagram posted that poem along with some others. We don’t talk on a regular basis, and live in completely different areas. Spooky!

Finished THE INVISIBLE MAN. I might have expected the character's fate to be ingenious and poetically apt, but in fact he just gets beaten up my a mob. The character's level of furious anger is never really explained. Nor does Wells go into the reasons for his seeming turn into madness, as he proclaims a reign of terror in which The Invisible Man will rule.

I think that I might have imagined that this book would contain pathos; that the title character would be a victim - rather as I imagine the Elephant Man to be. But he isn't. He chooses to make himself invisible, then steals from and hurts dozens of people without compunction. At most, I think that Wells implies that invisibility has driven him even madder and angrier than he was before.

Tété-Michel Kpomassie - An African in Greenland
Elizabeth Taylor - The Soul of Kindness.

it's years since i read the invisible man (and for some reason i always think it's by stevenson till i'm reminded, perhaps bcz of similarity to jekyll and hyde?) but my takeaway was certainly always that the IM's inevitable isolation was extremely mentally corrosive, and that this quickly overwhelmed the opportunities for petty crime and revenge and whatever -- and that that's the real subject of the story, that the removal by whatever means of any form of companionship is a psychological catastrophe and so there's no likelihood of him becoming a "superman" or whatever

a detail that i always recall is that the shiny bits at the back of a cat's eyes aren't rendered invisible (which is how we can know the cat is also going mad with terror at its new state, bcz the IM can watch its progress)

A long time ago a cousin brought a vinyl pressing of the infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast to my house and told me the blatant lie that Orson Welles was his son. I believed this to be a fact until I was 13. A humiliation I never really fully recovered from! Was just reading his wiki and struck by how shagging around he did for someone who wasn't in the best of health. And his early years were rougher than I expected.

― calzino, Monday, 15 August 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Welles really fucked.

wait was welles the cousin's dad or his son (fibbingly speaking)?

no that Wells beget Welles was the fib! A ridiculous thing to believe. He was a bit of a rudeboy, he goes over to visit Gorky and comes back to England with his gf on his arm.

amazing work all round

Next they'll be telling you that the guy who directed Let it Be was Orson Welles' son.

I haven't read The Invisble Man, but Claude Rains is equally FURIOUS in the James Whale film.

Doesn't David Thomson suggest that Welles also sired Peter O'Toole on his teenage ramblings through Ireland?

Sadly just finished Claire-Louise Bennett's CHECKOUT 19 - first book I've read this year which I never wanted to end. I absolutely adored POND a few years ago, but thought it was such a beautifully peculiar one-off that there was little chance of her following it up without diminishing returns. But it's great. Interesting companion to Tove Ditlevsen's COPENHAGEN TRILOGY which I read last month - except in place of Danish tenements, typewriters and tarts, a lot more cheap biros, Marlborough Reds and Brighton guesthouses. Also put me in mind of Kate Briggs' THIS LITTLE ART with its deft, intimate, moving phenomenology of reading and writing.

Have also been reading Joe Moran - his lovely recent books on shyness and failure. I think JM has quietly and diligently turned out to be one of the greatest living English essayists. So many brilliant details in these books - there are a couple of pages in IF YOU SHOULD FAIL where he manages to weave together Johann Cruyff, Virginia Woolf, Huizinga and the Brooklyn Dodgers and somehow manages to be very succinct, modest and wise.

I've started THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890) for the second time. (The first time was merely a false start when I only read a few pages.) Essentially it's in the category of books that I happen to own, and ought to read before buying or even borrowing anything else.

I hadn't realised how epigrammatic it was - just in the way that we know Wilde was - like one of his plays. I had perhaps thought there would be more novelistic narrative business in it; perhaps there will be, I'm still only in chapter two. Perhaps Wilde really cared more for dialogue than narrative and description. I have a sense that aspects of Wilde are apportioned to Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wooton (not so much to Dorian Gray), ie that they each carry an aspect of their creator.

Remarkable career to have produced 5 foundational SF narratives by about 1901 (time travel, alien invasion, space exploration, superpowers, mad scientist experimenting with genetics), then, I believe, largely left SF behind and gone into other literary modes.

More recent narratives and modes seem to be about a struggle with nature, that is also about being a part of it, and adaptation, internal and external, to post-apocalyptic circumstances (a slight shift in focus with less forward movement).

I was legitimately confused for a few seconds— in the US, at least, when someone writes INVISIBLE MAN, one immediately thinks of Ellison, not Wells. Or at least I do— I have never given HG Wells a single thought until today.

He wrote a lot of short stories too; local library has a collection of 50 that I sometimes take off the shelf and read in-house, should just check it out and plow through. Here's a .pdf of "The Land Ironclads," published in 1903, set in a near-future European land war (the Science Fiction Encyclopedia site has an very detailed entry about this subgenre: they knew it was coming). I'm struck now by the persistence of "gun culture" imagery: pastoral manly can-do self-defense, also the sporting aspect, in peacetime, where everybody knows the rules--vs. intrusion of pushbutton warfare, AK-47s and drones---the aging war correspondent here picks up on all of that (btw, something in his tone, though not wet, reminds me that average man lived about 45 years at turn of century) http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0604041h.html

*a* very

is pinefox going through all of the league of extraordinary gentlemen?

beardsley next

I finished Killers of the Flower Moon and can recommend it purely on the strength of its stunning portrayal of how pervasively racist and corrupt Oklahoma was in the 1920s, which is not to say the rest of the USA was substantially different, only that the book doesn't try to cover the entire nation.

I then read some more of Eve's Hollywood. I'm a third done and she's still telling tales of her teenage life, and as often happens with collections of short pieces published haphazardly over a period of years, the constant return to the same themes and obsessions is becoming repetitive.

Looking for something more substantial, I began The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand, a history of how the US Civil War catalyzed new intellectual and philosophical approaches to US social problems. It looks to be very interesting. I'll see how that develops.

I liked Dorian Gray, it can feel a bit flimsy at times but it’s by turns joking and serious, like someone laughing with you and then throwing a drink in your face. Are you reading the unredacted version? I think I’ve only ever read the censored versions.

Koogs: yes, I am accidentally rediscovering the fin de siecle.

I have in the past considered reading Aubrey Beardsley's UNDER THE HILL - his one novel I believe.

Gyac: I think the version I am reading is quite scholarly (though merely a Penguin), in that it has endnotes stating where things have been changed from other versions. So quite probably this is an unredacted version.

quartermaine and nemo and nina harker are the others iirc.

(in fact the point of the books is that they are *entirely* populated with fictional characters. including molesworth and gang as the rolling stones analog)

I have an Olympia Press/Traveller's Companion edition of Under the Hill - says 'completed by John Glassco'?

After the Wells discussion here, it was pleasing to see a copy of The Time Machine, with Wells' name on the cover, turn up in the final episode of Better Call Saul.

I had to correct myself when I saw that paperback cos I thought I had it then realised it was a First Men In The Moon apparently from the same series. Bought it in UWO in London Ontario.
Great covers anyway look like pulp sci fi magazine ones.

The Penguin Book Of The British Short Story, Vol.1 - Edited by Philip Hensher. I enjoyed the second volume of this, which goes from Wodehouse to Zadie Smith (I have no opinion on the compiler as an author), so thought I'd backtrack to the first. REALLY rough start - a Defoe sketch of a ghost story that may be of historical interest but is painfully generic; Swift being his usual "I'm saying one thing but mean the opposite DO YOU SEE" self in an essay that's basically just complaining about a servant; a Henry Fielding story about a woman who is - gasp - A LESBIAN which again is historically interesting, certainly for queer studies, but I'm not going to read a 18th century dude on this topic for fun; Hannah Moore and Mary Lamb competing to see who can be the most saccharine incarnation of old timey gentility (a fruit selling girl abused by her landlady gets saved by a cop's wife and taught Christianity and a small child visits her grandmother on a farm, respectively). Things get better starting with a Thackeray story and from thereon it's mostly reliable big names, but boy did I have to do some skipping to get there.

The compiler's contention that the British short story is "probably the richest, most varied and historically extensive in the world" feels a bit citation needed as well.

That's an incredible comment, but no surprise coming from Hensher.

Was reading this short yesterday. I've had more luck with Latin America.

You can read Elisa's translation of "The Flies", which appears in BEYOND, at our website now: https://t.co/JeQB6zWx4x pic.twitter.com/0mzGfbNBKX

— Sublunary Editions (@sublunaryeds) August 16, 2022

Horacio Quiroga is great. See also Felisberto Hernández.

Home Eoin O'Broin
left wing politician's argument for social housing. Looking at the effects of a bill passed in the mid 90s taht has had pretty negative consequences in terms of housing. THough presumably at least supposedly done for the common good.
I caught the local launch of this and have meant to read it ever since.
Pretty interesting anyway.

I Am Damo Suzuki Damo Suzuki, Paul Woods
cowritten memoir pf one time Can frontman. I thought this would be more in his voice but has a lot of 3rd person description as well as oral history from those he was around. It also seems to go through Can a lot faster than I was expecting, only has a couple of chapters with him in the band before he leaves with his Jehovah's Witness wife whose religion he soon leaves behind too.
He went on to be a salaryman in a German branch of a Japanese firm for the next two and a half decades which is where i've got to so far.

finished
Mother of Invention Katrine Marcal.
starts off with some decent ideas and refers to some interesting facts but I think is argued poorly and tries to beat one over the head with too many things that are not as fully supported as the author would like. I think there are other books on the subject which argue the points better and I think the author cites them in her bibliography.
I'll look into those cos I would like to have a well argued version of the basic argument. Does seem a little like something that might be seen as white feminism and could be so much more.

Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi
The 2 authors dialogue about the history and basic principles of Capitalism.
THink I might have done better not to rush read teh last few chapters in order to get book back and borrow more.
Cos i think what I did tale in was pretty worthwhile, think I am going to try to read more by both authors. & have a bibliography to work through.

& borrowed
Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir
which I think I got pointed to by tie ins with The Northman some of the research for which was done by the author.
Not really looked into this yet but should be pretty interesting. The role of woman in the Viking world which has recently been shown to have been more ethnically diverse than some would like to see it. & IO think most pre Industrial Revolution societies had a different attitude to the breakdown of gender work divide etc so will be good to see what is said here.

&
God is Red: A Native View of Religion Vine Deloria Jr.,
which looks into Native American understandings of religion etc and was something I heard referred to elsewhere. I think it was in the bibliographies of Thomas King's the Inconvenient Indian and the book on Bordertowns by native American authors i read earlier this year

if the defoe is "the apparition of mrs veal", it's also often cited as a precursor to the modern ghost story (not at all the same thing of course as the modern short story): as always with defoe -- who was a professional journalist at a fast-evolving highly conflicted time -- you have to be careful what's intended as fact, what's fable, what's grift and what's crusade (some of his writing is literally all four at once lol, and the ghost stories are i think generally categorised as "true", in the sense that defoe was inventing the weekly world news here rather than tales from the crypt

i checked why hensher is deplored on ilx (mid-level not-great novelist who writes amusingly rude reviews that ppl often don't agree with?) and i can't tell from daniel's summary what his stance as editor is on when the "short story" per se arrived as we understand it (mid-19th century makes sense, it's a product of a specific kind of magazine ecology) and what its actual relationship is to its precursors -- the examples listed are all in a sense of a kind of precursor of course, in that post-arrival the short story presumably picked up some of the readers who'd favoured one of the precursors, but they're also all performing a very different function for an identifiably different primary readership (different from the "short story" but also different from one another), and almost all also flourished before the novel proper (aka the "long story" haha) has settled into an agreed-on role

I met Hensher once. As far as I recall he was not especially pleasant or polite. But that is of no course no comment on his fiction.

"i checked why hensher is deplored on ilx (mid-level not-great novelist who writes amusingly rude reviews that ppl often don't agree with?)"

He is a South London local, see him now and then and will be sure to pass this on.

mark, Hensher goes into the genealogy of the short story in his intro: basically he sets up one camp as placing the short story as a 19th century invention, another as taking a wider view that might take in the Canterbury Tales and Manderville, and himself, I guess, somewhere in the middle (always a comfortable strategy to suggest two warring camps and yourself as the reasonable middle ground ofc).

Some of the more engaging parts of his intro are about the lost ecology of short story magazines and how reading stories in those differs from our current main way of consuming them, i.e. single author collections

The Defoe is indeed the one you cited - I did indeed assume it was included for its pioneering role in the ghost story, and truth be told I had a good enough time with it, tho having read many of those it certainly didn't stand out much

so i finally finished cancer ward, which i first began reading in like 1980 lol

i will post some thoughts at some point

i liked it mostly but the nobel shd have gone to césaire

Did you go back and start over from the 1980 bits?

Been reading Brazilian (Giovana Madalosso), Catalan (Jaume Cabré) and Portuguese (Mário Zambujal) authors, but none of the books I read have been translated into English so have nothing to contribute here.

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Other themes: friendship between men, rivalry between sisters, the microsocieties that evolve during wartime (I think my mother's family got by doing laundry and making bread (probably steamed not baked) for the U.S. Army; I'm not sure how my father's family survived; I'm guessing it was not an issue so therefore not as memorable or my father just doesn't talk very much)

I'm guessing the medical terminology was deliberately acquired and is not as convincing or moving as the art and history of art.

dow: i restarted tho even then the restart was also a bit bumpy (ie i re-began it two years ago and then there was a hiatus again and this time i didn't go back)

now i am reading little-known obscurity the satanic verses

I had known of some relation between A REBOURS and DORIAN GRAY, but hadn't realised how pivotal it was. It seems that Husymans' novel has a huge influence on the character and determines much of his course in life - though Wilde for whatever reason doesn't name the book or author.

Much of the book is more readable than I'd expected, When Wilde here does get away from dialogue and into more extended 3rd-person narrative, it doesn't always go well. I'm thinking especially of the strangely distended catalogues of historical facts that DG gets interested in, about which king owned which jewel, and so on - in Chapter XI. This particular section is at least as tedious as some people like to say the catalogues in the second half of Ulysses (Cyclops, Circe) are - in fact usually much more tedious, as Joyce is usually being comic.

The question of what DG's 'sins' are remains, thus far, murky. They dare not speak their names. It seems in part to involve drugs; opium dens for instance. One possibly interesting fact is that it doesn't seem to be all homosexual - it is implied that he has corrupted and disgraced women as well, even after his first disastrous romance with Sibyl Vane. That episode surprised me (DG is in love with a woman!?) and reminded me a bit of an old Guardian article headed something like 'James Dean: his secret straight life'.

I sense a relation between Wilde's precious narrative style and a) that of Joyce's Portrait (where that style is arguably ironised) and b) a bit more surprisingly perhaps, that of Virginia Woolf. The link in the latter case (and even, come to think of it, in the former) would probably be Walter Pater, whose sister, as I recall, taught Woolf.

I am only 2/3 through and thus my impression of the book is far from complete.

Much of the book is more readable than I'd expected, When Wilde here does get away from dialogue and into more extended 3rd-person narrative, it doesn't always go well.

Should more usefully have read something like:

Much of the book is more readable than I'd expected, especially as it's made up of witty quasi-intellectual dialogue. But when Wilde here does get away from dialogue and into more extended 3rd-person narrative, it doesn't always go well.

i'm guessing that 130-yrs-plus of political activism of various kinds make it very hard not to project back on wilde and beardsley and such a much more cut-and-dried modern sexuality than they or their readers (friendly or hostile) understood themselves to be declaring or revealing, or whatever, beyond the (i feel provocatively vague) idea of "decadence": what descriptor would you roll out for salome, for example (which they both worked on)*? clock jokanaan (aka john the baptist) flinching away from the heorine: WHAT IF SEX, BUT TOO MUCH?

(huysmans apparently mentions moreau's salomé paintings: moreau being one of the few precursors that breton would accept for surrealism… )

•wilde was pretty cutting abt beardsley's illustration-work for salomé: possibly bcz it's better than his play lol (i have never seen it; richard strauss's music is exactly what you' expect, like being force-fed a cauldron-full of delicious but faintly weird-tasting chocolates)

https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/beardsley/8.jpg

force-fed a cauldron-full of delicious but faintly weird-tasting chocolates) Goes perfectly w that illustration!

the (i feel provocatively vague) idea of "decadence" This worked better than I would have thought in the screen adapatation: at least, it kept me watching---wiki:

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a 1945 American horror-drama film based on Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel of the same name. Released in June 1945 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film is directed by Albert Lewin and stars George Sanders as Lord Henry Wotton and Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray. Shot primarily in black-and-white, the film features four colour inserts in three-strip Technicolor of Dorian's portrait; these are a special effect, the first two inserts picturing a youthful Dorian and the second two a degenerate one.

That episode surprised me (DG is in love with a woman!?) and reminded me a bit of an old Guardian article headed something like 'James Dean: his secret straight life'. Will have to look for that---you're reminding me of an unexpected aspect of Tim Lawrence's Arthur Russell bio, especially the sexual tension between AR and the very articulate, candid, romantic, mystically educated Joyce Bowden, whose looks matched her "seraphic" voice, to an extent that even got the musically obsessed Russell distracted, exclaiming to his engineer, like, omg is she real, do I wake or dream, and declaring, "I'm a closet heterosexual." The tension between them was mostly creative friction, but hard to entirely sublimate, and seems to have been obliquely expressed when she was late to a session, and he said, "Oh well at least you look good," which she found crushing, and is the only cruel quote in the book: he could be Cap'n Ahab of the Perfect Take, but this was understood, by Bowden and several others (at least until some of the latter burned out) as not only compulsion, but a quest for something deeper, for finding himself in the music.
This also comes up in his relationship with Jennifer Warnes, as he taught her parts that she didn't understand in themselves, that he was trying to find himself in the music as well as vice-versa, and she also got that she was his guide, companion, and California Blonde Stoner Muse, a bridge back to and from his 60s Bay Area Buddhist minimalist student days, when, as Lawrence shows, he was known exclusively as a girl-lover, with at least a couple of intense relationships, and at one point seemed well on the way to getting married, until her parents broke it up.
He continued corresponding with that woman during the New York years, also stayed in touch with the other one, sometimes visited California, and, whether he ever got back into het sex---which seems possible; Tom Lee assures Russell that their long-time partnership was very open.

These relationships become part of what Lawrence calls Russell's rhizomes, which also include his sometimes recombinant subsets of musicians, to suit his very varied musical interests, and his birth family, certainly including his parents, who financially supported him his whole life (he pointed out to them that they'd given his sisters a new car and a house when each of them got married, so hey), his improbably long(but not infinitely)-lasting partnership in a record label, huge amounts of free time at a couple of studios (though one owner eventually got him to do work in return, for while; the other one just eventually burned out on Arthur, who ended up with a true Tower of Song, peeking out of stacks of equipment in his and Tom Lee's little living room, as photographed by Lee)(again, the open partnership helped, most likely).

Laying out the networks of networks is a Tim Lawrence specialty in his music culture trilogy, where paasion is matched by and maybe sublimated in his expertise and integrity as a historian.

Tom Lee assures *Lawrence* (Russell seems unlikely to have invited assurance) Also, another of Russell's long-time musical associates saw Arthur as bi, if not basically het, although yet another thinks that guy is projecting.

FOR people who like Aubrey Beardsley's artwork I'd recommend checking out harry Clarke who reminded me heavily of him when I first saw his artwork. Pretty great Irish painter/stained glass artist.

“TV’s man’s tarantula!”

https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/30-clarke-faust.jpg

The comics artist P Craig Russell did an adaptation of Salome that makes definite nods to Beardsley:

https://oscholars-oscholars.com/special-issues/contents/dierkes-thrun/

summer reading

annie ernault - a girl's story

most of this bored me, but there was about 40p of it (the part at the summer camp during which the main dramatic events unfold) that i was completely absorbed by. so despite not enjoying it on the whole, i'm game to read more ernault. she's a great prose stylist and has a very dark sense of humour that strikes me as very "french". fun passage that i highlighted in my epub app:

As if language, a late arrival in human evolution, did not impress itself as readily as images, all that remains of the thousands of words exchanged with other instructors-in-training at the course held in a castle in Hautot-sur-Seine, during the Easter holidays, is one snickering comment made by a teacher with pitted skin and dark glasses, in the kitchen, where we were teamed up for dish duty. You look like a decrepit old whore. I attributed the comment to the excess of foundation and rouge on my pale skin, and was unable to think of any reply but: And you look like an old pimp, flustered and probably stunned by the untoward resurgence of the whore around the edges.

jordan castro - the novelist

new hyped post-alt-lit-meta-auto-fiction(?) novella about scrolling twitter while procrastinating writing a novel. contains what must be the most accurate second-by-second description of what it's like to be online in 2022 in literature, and also some pretty good scatological humour. pretty fun and fresh blend of tao lin, nicholson baker and thomas bernhard

roger scruton - kant: a very short introduction

i reconnected with an old high school friend this summer who is now a deep bearded philosopher who loves kant, and his enthusiasm was infectious enough to get me to download and read this epub. whether or not i "agree" with the arguments presented, they're pretty enjoyable to think through. also enjoyed this 20 year old mark s post

attempting a compromise between empiricism and rationalism, kant shd have gone back the wigshop and poured sloppy pancake mix into the shopkeeper's trousers

― mark s, Saturday, June 8, 2002 8:00 PM (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

wilde was pretty cutting abt beardsley's illustration-work for salomé

Isn't that in part because the illustrations contained caricatures of Wilde?

The Picture of Dorian Gray was a formative novel. I read it for the third time in March 2020, and while I found much of the dialogue between the rich nimrods tedious (Wilde admitted he had to pad the novel for the sake of serialization), he perfected that kind of banter just a couple years later in his plays. A more fun read than A Rebours, which iirc boasts pages and pages of catalogues this or that bric-a-brac -- in its way a Balzac novel given a Decadent gloss.

I think I agree with Mark S in his suggestion that c.1890, the idea of being definitely and exclusively homosexual was not something that people were so keen to promote - not just because it was dangerous (it certainly was), but maybe because the idea of this exclusive identity had not caught on so much (eg, as Mark says, in an activist way). So Dorian Gray has hints of homosexuality but also repeatedly 'corrupts' or 'disgraces' women - in fact, it's oddly accurate to say that the book provides far, far more evidence of his heterosexual career than any alternative sexuality. Even about 20 pages from the end a Duchess is still thinking about whether to have an affair with him.

I think I agree with poster Alfred that DORIAN GRAY is more readable than A REBOURS, which is indeed, as I recall, much more of a catalogue and less of a story. I also note now that I shouldn't have said that Gray definitely reads A REBOURS: it's left implicit and ambiguous, and, more surprisingly, in the first edition it was apparently named as a fictional French book invented by Wilde.

Poster Gyac earlier mentioned censored and uncensored versions; I now know that what I've been reading is the 'censored' version of 1891, as against the first magazine version of 1890. The main difference seems to be that in the first version Basil Hallward is more open about his adoration of Gray, and in the second this theme is sublimated into talk of art.

I've finished the novel, which maybe leaves a bad taste in the mouth - which you could say is intentional. One aspect that kept coming to mind was the idea that this whole novel also has a, let's say, 'confessional' role for its author. Wilde was scandalous, was whispered about, led a double life with two sexual identities, was feted in some houses and shunned in others - etc. All of that also applies to Gray. To a degree, then, Wilde seems to be projecting an exaggerated version of his own situation into this character's. One complication here might be that Gray may actually resemble Wilde's lover Alfred Douglas more than he does Wilde himself (and Wilde would be closer to Lord Henry Wotton, but also to Basil Hallward, who more pathetically loves Gray and is later killed by him for no good reason). But another complication is that Gray is clearly ashamed of his life, knows that it's sinful (and this shows in his painting). Did Wilde think the same about his own experiences? I don't think he thought the same as Dorian Gray, but it's plausible to say that, like many people, he had mixed feelings, including guilt, shame and so on, which were naturally influenced by society and ideology around him, and that he partly projects these to the character. The whole thing could in these terms be considered an extrapolation, an experiment with Wilde's own feelings about himself.

Then again Wilde would I suppose have denied this, and he more often talks (in the Preface to this novel and numerous other places) of books as works of art separate from life.

On the dialogue, again, the late exchanges between Lord Henry and the Duchess are quite appealing -- virtually the only time in the book that a woman gets to talk on a level with the men. I suppose that somewhat more equal scenario is then played out again in the plays.

I think I read Wilde writing once that Basil what he wanted to be, Lord Henry whom the public thought he was, and Dorian whom he really was.

Cid Corman - Livingdying
Marie Darrieussecq - Pig Tales
Renee Gladman - The Activist
Martine Syms - Shame Space
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?: A Song-play

Currently reading Georges Perec's W or the Memory of Childhood and Norma Cole's Where Shadows Will

Norma!

A couple of aesthetics books:

Noël Carroll - The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart (1990)
C. Thi Nguyen - Games: Agency as Art (2020)

Both very accessible, nicely written, on interesting topics.

speaking of the invisible man... the well regarded 2020 film is on itv tonight, 22:45

I finished "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge". It's definitely a good thing that my Vintage edition of the book comes with endnotes to explain the copious references to obscure late Medieval and Renaissance figures. Here's a random sampling of personages mentioned by Rilke with confidence the reader will get the allusion: Deodatus of Gozon, Teresa of Avila, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Louise Labe, the Countess of Die, Clara of Anduze, Julie de Lespinasse, Aisse, Pope John XXII, Christine de Pisan, Heloise and Abelard, Bettina von Arnim, Grishka Otrepyov, and so on. The book is not an easy one to read, partly because of the references, and partly because it switches gears rapidly as the narrator's thoughts roam over the centuries, and then to memories of his youth and childhood in an ancien regime noble household, and then to his current straitened circumstances as an anonymous poet in a Parisian garret apartment. Its hard to explain what makes the book so memorable, but if you're the kind of person who thinks reading and writing alone in a garret can be a thrilling and romantic existence, then this book may be for you.

poll those personages!

i know heloise and abelard (once-famous tragic love story) and christine de pisan (i think i have a book by her that i never read) and also i read mechthild of magdeburg as METH-CHILD of magdeburg (maybe they're related to the unicorn)

plus googling tells me that teresa of avila is in fact st teresa: "Teresa, who became a celebrity in her town dispensing wisdom from behind the convent grille, was also known for her raptures, which sometimes involved levitation" (same) "Examination of her [miraculously preserved medical record] has led to the speculative conclusion that she may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.[20][21]"

I love that Rilke novel, found the switching (the speed of it) quite a thrill at the time. I probably would get more of the refs now as I've read Labe, Heloise, the Troubadours..

Do look up Labe's poetry from NYRB classics, who put out an edition of them.

I've started H.G. Wells' THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU (1896). Like that other island novel ROBINSON CRUSOE it poses as a 'found document', a true history of life on an island with a foreword by someone else. My impression is that some of Defoe's readers might have believed this, Wells's wouldn't.

The first few chapters are all in seafaring jargon which is rather overdone. Endless mainbraces, gunwales, and less familiar words. Reminiscent of Conrad save that Conrad knew this material intimately, and I don't think Wells did.

It's standard to say 'this old book contains some dubious ideas about race', but this one really pushes the ... boat out. For instance:

From him my eyes travelled to his three men; and a strange crew they were. I saw only their faces, yet there was something in their faces — I knew not what — that gave me a queer spasm of disgust. I looked steadily at them, and the impression did not pass, though I failed to see what had occasioned it. They seemed to me then to be brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East. They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me, — faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen.

More pushing the species boat out, isn't? it? Intimations ov too freaky/looks like trouble. From the time of "crime science," phrenology, tongue shapes, all of that and then some, seems to be in beholder's pre-radar. (Although race science could also be in crime science.)

Didn't mean to have extra question mark

Why the moon travels / Oein DeBhairduin ; illustrated by Leanne McDonagh.
Gay Irish Traveller author retelling a number of Traveller folktales. I've been meaning to read this since it came out.
He did a talk in the Sibin fake pub venue in a local exhibition on Saturday which reminded me that I wanted to read it. Plus he had a copy of the book with him which may be the first time I physically saw it, had thought i was going to be a larger children's picture book looking thing but it is filed under adult. I then found out taht the local library had copies which it is saying are New so recently acquired. I think this was released in 2020 during the first lockdown and I may have been at most things online.
Anyway looking forward to getting into this

A brief history of neoliberalism / David Harvey.
book I've wanted to read for a while since i wanted to further understand what neoliberalism really consisted of.
Been a bit of a chore getting hold of this through interlibrary loans since it appeared to disappear as either a lost or a long overdue book.
Well got it now. So need to read it.

The Alienist, by Caleb Carr. I realize I'm coming in on this 18 years late, but at least I haven't seen the show. It's fairly engaging, although it does have a bit of the "Oh, look! There's Franz Boas!" quality that some historical novels have. I'm more than half suspecting that I'm ultimately not going to care who the murderer is.

Eighteen? More like 28. Holy shit.

I finished THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU. Good adventure yarn with stimulating content about vivisection, genetics, humans / animals and so on. I'd recommend it. Yet one slight flaw, I feel, is that Wells doesn't make the beast-men especially vivid in their own right. By the time he's talking about a Hyena-Swine or a Rhino-Horse it's hard to picture them. I think a writer now might make more effort to describe each one.

The story is interesting in that Dr Moreau and his assistants seem like villains, but become allies, and the protagonist isn't involved in a final battle with them, as you might expect. Moreau, having discussed his ideas at length, is actually killed by a beast some way before the book finishes. And there's an unexplained mystery about the boat with two dead sailors, possibly recognised by the protagonist, in which he casts off from the island at the end.

A very late irony: on the last page the narrator says that only looking up at the lofty heavens can raise humanity from its bestial condition. Two years later THE WAR OF THE WORLDS begins in those lofty heavens, with Martians, rather than anything divine or benign, looking with interest at Earth.

I started Megan Abbott's QUEENPIN (2007). 1950s noir pastiche. To be honest the pastiche seems clumsily overdone - I'm disappointed.

I’m reading her latest, The Turnout, right now, and I’m finding it similarly overripe.

finished A Tale Of Two Cities. cobbled together a version based on the weekly episodes and not the monthly / collected version that Project Gutenberg has (probably). when i compared the two the differences were mainly hyphens, the odd word and a sentence and a half from one of the minor characters. still...

the Penguin Classics notes on this have pointed out Hugo's Ninety-Three and Dumas' Ange Pitou as similar but i can't find a copy of the full version of the latter - there's a 36 chapter version in PG but lots of scans of a wildly-different 70 chapter version on archive.org, but the OCR for the epub versions is k-rub (28% accuracy it says)

it's one of my favourite dickens novels, i think, despite being a bit atypical (historical). it's shorter than most, at least

I'm stuck between two Tanizaki titles: The Key and Some Prefer Nettles. Which?

I'm more attracted to the second title.
xxxpost

also cool:

And there's an unexplained mystery about the boat with two dead sailors, possibly recognised by the protagonist, in which he casts off from the island at the end.

A very late irony: on the last page the narrator says that only looking up at the lofty heavens can raise humanity from its bestial condition. Two years later THE WAR OF THE WORLDS begins in those lofty heavens, with Martians, rather than anything divine or benign, looking with interest at Earth.

I know I watched the film of The Key, can't remember if I also read it as part of a Japanese film & literature class.

Love love love Some Prefer Nettles.

Haven't read The Key.

I'm sampling a range of crime writers. Megan Abbott has struck out. Also trying:

Sara Paretsky, INDEMNITY ONLY (1982) - the first novel to feature woman private eye V.I. Warshawski. Set in its present day, very much in Chicago, it's much better than the Abbott novel. It's surprisingly 'sassy' in a proto-chick-lit way at moments ('I thought about the carbs and decided not to order fries'), but also pretty solid as detection so far. Has a background of radical / labour politics and business.

Ross Macdonald, THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE (1962): this is even better. I've wanted to read Macdonald for years. He doesn't disappoint. I can see how it's the successor to Chandler, but the language and tone are reined in by comparison. Best thing in it is essentially the dialogue between private eye Lew Archer and the various characters he encounters. I realise I could read this stuff for ever - I imagine the book as automatically generated, just going on and on.

I'm also going to read Patricia Highsmith, a writer who's always been quite mysterious to me.

Nick Seabrook - One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America

Macdonald is indeed great, with the one caveat that he pretty much wrote the same Archer book every time - family secrets, melancholy philosophy, sea and sunshine, bourgeois callousness. Best not to ready too many in one go. Highsmith is a more varied writer and in some ways more inconsistent (albeit with a pretty consistent 'moral vision'), but there's nobody else quite like her within or without crime fiction. The first Ripley novel is a good one to begin with.

"A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America"

Is the surprise that gerrymandering hasn't happened in America?

the surprise is that it (occasionally) hasn't happened

https://www.masshist.org/database/images/985_gerrymander_trans_ref.jpg

The surprise, after a hundred pages, is who endorsed it, I suppose.

Beginning of semester reading has thrown me for a loop, of course, but in my spare time (ha!) I’ve been reading and enjoying Steve Benson’s ‘Blue Book.’ While he is associated with the Language poets, the work is not as highly abstracted and loaded with parataxis, instead moving through realms of the self, our everyday speech patterns, and the possibilities of an improvisational writing. Interesting work.

Tabes! I got Prynne's The Oval Window on Sunday -- the marvelous NYRB edition with illustrations and footnotes.

xps

I definitely prefer Paretsky to Abbott. And Highsmith to most writers.

I had to return The Man in the High Castle because the copy I checked out was too dodgy to read comfortably despite having been rebound; I checked out instead a Library of America compendium of his novels from the 1960s, which includes said novel. I plan to read the novels with Carlo Rovelli's There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness at different times of day.

I returned the novels by Anthony Marra and am curious to see what happens when he writes about film.

Tabes! I got Prynne's The Oval Window on Sunday -- the marvelous NYRB edition with illustrations and footnotes.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, August 24, 2022 6:09 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Alfred, this is great! But do you mean the Bloodaxe edition, which is mostly annotations? Yellow cover with a photo on it?

(I have this edition as well as the first edition— it is one of my favorites of his books, tho the big expanded version I think you're speaking of has not really been cracked as of yet, as I am waiting until we get to it in my Prynne reading group!)

It comes with both: the poem + photos and the poem + annotations. A generous introduction too.

Totally— I just mentioned the sheer number of annotations because the original book is quite slim!

I didn't mean to let it blurt re xpost Tim Lawrence's Arthur Russell bio, but since I did, I'll try provide a better overall description. The title is Hold On To Your Dreams---Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. Lawrence explains Downtown and Uptown, in social and musical differences, time and space (they're pretty close geographically, until NYC real estate fever and other Reagan first term financial factors push artists farther apart in several ways, as depicted more broadly and deeply via the other volumes of TL's NYC music culture trilogy, which he doesn't rehash here).
He also loops back to Russell's ever-resourceful parents, making their way through the Depression and WWII to impeccably square social standing and an impeccably hip, wide-ranging record collection, a crucial influence on little Arthur, who is otherwise quite the handful. His antsy, awkward semi-sociable demeanor somehow stands him in good stead, too consistently to be uncanny luck, though there seems to be some of that.

He leaves Iowa and high school for the Summer of Love, gets in trouble, but somehow it works out for him to be in custody of a family friend (and older kid), until his 18th birthday. Then he gets involved with a Bay Area Buddhist cult, but, although the leader is tough on Arthur, he pays for music school---and not, "You will learn to play the cello even better, and bring the money and glory back to meee"--no, just because the talent was a flower that needed watering. So he goes and learns a lot about Indian music and more about Buddhism; he and the cult ensemble play and record with Allen Ginsberg (an amazing track on one of AG's box sets). When Arthur goes to New York (to be a star, his way), Ginsberg may be the one (night stand, apparently) who introduces him to the joy of gay sex, but mainly, they record some more excellent tracks, and Gins lets him and Tom Lee run a power line upstairs to their apartment.
Arthur becomes programmer at the Kitchen, and upsets the applecart by presenting a rock band, and not the Velvets, but the oddball Modern Lovers. This precedent proves to be influential in different ways, as described by Peter Gordon and Rhys Chatham, two fairly different composers. Arthur continues to adapt what he's learned in the groovy West to New York's crackling Dark Ages, and he and the ML's Ernie Brooks have a recurring professional relationship, upsetting more applecarts, incl. rock ones; Brooks persists in bringing Arthur into situations where he must know, on some level, things will then go sideways, b-b-but Arthur really does love and make pop-rock on his own, so...
His early NYC friend and admirer Philip Glass does him a solid/hands him off to Robert Wilson for a new project, in part because Glass has a more lucrative commission already, and doesn't want to go back to driving a gypsy cab and being a handyman, as happened yet again after the critical landmark of Einstein on the Beach This new opera is a big chance for Arthur, and he's all in, as always, however...
One of the ways that Lawrence keeps this from being a highbrow ep of Behind The Music, although it is that in part (unavoidably to some extent, being a bio of a muso, times the eventual advent of AIDS) is his own deep listening to and accessible description of some challenging music, the challenge coming not only from esoterica, but its opposite, the most poptastic, hype-inspiring kind, also admixtures of both kinds. Oncen again, the academic and self-taught discipline of the historian balances the passion of the fan, as mentioned upthread.

Lawrence also deals, as well as he can in this 2009-published book, with the extent to which Russell's still-emerging recorded work has proved to be "an iceberg," in the TL-quoted take of ikx alum Jess Harvell. An iceberg somewhere between the posthumous careers of eternally prolific Coltrane and Hendrix, and those of mostly-unknown-in-their-lifetime Joseph Cornell and Henry Darger.

Re: Ross Macdonald, I agree with Ward, he’s not really built for bingeing, but the novels from Galton Case onwards are AFAIK all consistently good-to-great-to-classic. He’s one of those authors whose “flaws” are what make his interesting and idiosyncratic. The novels repeat the same formula for decades, but then the repetitions (and small variations) become wonders in themselves. His metaphors can be clunky and overheated - but that’s also what gives them power and humour. I found “The Chill” and “Galton Case” highlights; I also keep hearing great things about the book by his wife Margaret Millar.

Several of her books came back into print a few years ago, but I've only read the shorter version of "The Iron Gates" (later a 300+ page novel) in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthology: homefront WWII Canada, hothouse culture/situation feverish around the edges with implosions and oblique stroke social observations adding to tension, earning its iron gates.

The PKD anthology read by Youn should be quite good. I think the texts were chosen by Lethem (but they're probably unsurprising choices).

I'm most of the way through my first ever Patricia Highsmith: THE GLASS CELL (1964). It concerns a man wrongfully imprisoned, his attempts to be free, what he does when he gets out. The descriptions of prison life are grim and detailed but the convict somewhat adapts to it.

I have come to find this novel compelling. I keep reading on. I find that PH doesn't engage in anything fancy: she just tells us, in order, what the character does and sees, thinks and feels. His thoughts and feelings change, sometimes quickly, and he thinks about this. She tells us. The directness is so effective, maybe because the situation is quite unusual.

Thinking about directness, I think of Hemingway and Carver and my uncertainty about how good they are. FWIW my sense is that EH was overrated, RC probably better and more intriguing. Highsmith seems to me to outdo these writers, here, not by being any more elaborate, but just by telling a more interesting story. The novel *does* slightly resemble something Carver could have done - the gradual examination of a troubled man's moods - but I am not sure that he would have risen to tell this story, at this length.

Cather also superior to Hemingway.

I hope I'll get time in future to enjoy Ross Macdonald at length, as others have done.

But I note that his work is hard to find in the UK. This week in 3 major, large London bookshops and 2 major university libraries, I found one novel, THE UNDERGROUND MAN. I never see him in any 2nd-hand shop. To be sure, one can buy much online - my one is 2nd-hand that way - but if it's a 2nd-hand book, condition can then be uncertain. And with a writer I like, I'd still like to see them represented a little on the shelves of shops and libraries.

Highsmith on the other hand has been kept in print and colourful new covers to attract browsers. I daresay she deserves it.

I listened to the Better Read Than Dead episode on the Talented Mr Ripley a few weeks ago which was interesting and had a different perspective on a number of factors. Ripley's aspirations, Highsmith's attitude to the world which I think seemed a tad snobbish , and a few other things. The presenters are white American leftists who can be pretty obnoxious but I find them listenable.

I watched the French 60s film of the book last year Plein Soleil/Purple Noon which was quite good too. & the 90s US film of it when it came out and a couple of times since

Slightly surprised to hear about the scarcity of Macdonald in London bookshops, pinefox. Penguin reissued a number of Lew Archer books in a uniform edition not very long ago:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/64658/ross-macdonald

As for secondhand, you used to see the 1980 Allison & Busby paperback editions quite often, and I think they may have even been remaindered at some point. Steve Holland has a nice selection of earlier UK covers on his Bear Alley website:

https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2017/04/ross-macdonald-cover-gallery.html

Sometimes Highsmith's directness is actually serving an indirect purpose - ie the lead character's seemingly straightforward thoughts, feelings etc are slowly revealed to be delusional, even psychopathic, the narrator's perception of the world subtly askew. I haven't read The Glass Cell, so not sure if it's the case with that one. But I wouldn't be surprised if this prisoner actually turned out to be as guilty as hell. We're pretty much all as guilty as hell in Highsmith land.

You can't really go wrong with 50s/60s Highsmith, but there's a definite decline after that - the books become a bit more episodic rather than tightly plotted, and the writing not so good. The Glass Cell is good, but there are plenty better.

Would love to find all those Macdonalds on a shelf!

LRB shop for instance has zero.

What you say about Highsmith, Ward Fowler, rings true even on what I've read so far.

hemingway is like the ramones i think: an extreme expression at a hinge-moment of a collective shift in sensibility, a sweeping out of the attics of the mass literary mind

his contemporaries who were better ( or "better") were no way so evidently associated (let alone congratulated for) with the shift: they had made a different, far less stark, less embattled relationship with the past, where he was the posterboy for the swerve, which was invaluable for journalism among other things, and got a long pass as a consequence… you were just onside with him even when you weren't nodding in agreement at the stances taken (viz re the spanish civil war)

(the exception here being gertrude stein probably, and i'm not sure if anyone today considers her "better" than EH, so) (but his ear is quite like hers -- attuned to everything that chimes in with what's being left unsaid)

(analogy with ramones doesn't entirely work lol as the attics of 70s rock and pop had barely been stacking up their lumber for merely a decade, whereas the hemingway moment clears out something like 60 or 70s of approach to sentences and organisation and deciding what counts as assumed) (but the point is that anyone saying "the ramones are overrated" is alomost always misunderstanding why they meant something when they did)

I think it is something of a matter of record that EH was directly influenced by Stein.

I think most literary people now would say Stein is better than EH. (I expect that responses to your post may confirm this.)

I don't share this view; I don't like her, and am not very impressed by him either.

Unsure how far I agree with the broad Mark S point here. Could be said that Joyce and Pound among others (including Stein of course) had already altered attitudes to sentences, minimalism, etc, before EH really got going. But EH presumably more influential in journalism.

I don't know EH's later work at all, only the 1920s really.

I should add that while talking about EH may always be worthwhile, introducing him was a bit of a red herring in relation to Highsmith. I was just thinking about her directness and why I find it more effective and interesting than others'. I don't think her novel resembles EH much.

Many young men with literary aspirations discover (discovered?) Hemingway in high school, become infatuated, naturally so, since so much of American education consists of teaching students the wrong ideas about What Matters in prose. Few try imitating him with analytical/non-fiction prose, though the intentions at first glance seem antithetical.

i don't feel joyce or pound contributed much to the utilitarian decluttering of prose that i have in mind: yes of course it changed how we hear prose but their modernism is very much a maximalism (you're not being enjoined to cast away the 19th century, more to add it in along with all the other centuries: the many modes that now jostle alongside one another)

as for the issue of things unsaid, the issue isn't that prose before a certain point didn't deal in the resonance of the implied (kipling is little else lol) but more that stein and hemingway were seeing how far you could push the notion of leaving stuff out and letting the reader supply it, and the effects this delivers (of shared assumption and also of the surprises embedded in this): GS of course in an avant-gardy kind of way, but EH in a way that wildly appealed to a new young mass readership (including magazine writers, of fact and fiction, of a certain age)

i'm sure that magazine writers read and enjoyed joyce and (possibly) pound and (maybe) stein but i don't think their various devices were seized on anything like so widely in the new, much sparer kind of reading and writing i have in mind

alfred i'm talking abt the 30s and 40s really, i feel yr comment applies to a much later era (tho of course the feeling pervasive overfamiliarity is the same)

anyway my main point is just that hemingway's tics were so widely adopted that it's very hard to have a sense of their energy when they were new

The overall discussion here is too diverse to have a strong view for or against - different things happening in different decades and genres of writing - but:

i don't feel joyce or pound contributed much to the utilitarian decluttering of prose that i have in mind: yes of course it changed how we hear prose but their modernism is very much a maximalism

FWIW I disagree with this statement: Pound, with a few others but most vocally, did more decluttering in *poetry* (OK, not prose) than most C20 writers, around 1912 (or earlier?). As it's poetry it could be a red herring, but then he did always tend to connect poetry to prose and say one should be as well written as the other. EP in turn it was who highly praised the early Joyce, c.1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, for his 'spare hard prose', as if JJ were writing with Imagist minimalism - most obviously in DUBLINERS.

The later episodes of Ulysses, like the Cantos, are another matter, and correspond to what Mark S says.

But my assumption is always that DUBLINERS did do much to make short-story prose in English starker and cooler, though we may assume that it did this by importing from foreign models - Turgenev, Flaubert, Maupassant - in a way that I have never 100% understood (unsurprising as I don't know a word of Russian) and rarely gets fully articulated.

The idea that the short story is a minimal form, in which you say more by saying less, and end without being clear what's been revealed -- something I would broadly associate with Carver, and a whole idea of the form -- I have long taken to be a legacy of the early Joyce.

Of course there are, in fact, other, very different ways of writing short stories (Barthelme, say), which have little to do with any of this.

Reading Sherwood Anderson's Poor White this summer was an eye-opener: an influence on Hemingway such that H wrote a parody of his prose for the sake of breaking a publishing contract and breaking a friendship. A queerer and more sentimental influence.

pinefox, I do wonder about your claim of Pound ‘decluttering’ poetry— from my vantage, it is the Pisan cantos (inarguably his greatest work imho) that brought forth the parataxis, referentiality, and seeming spontaneity that are hallmarks of Modernism and its afterlives, in poetry at least. Hell, the Language school wouldn’t exist at all without Pound, neither would the late Modernists of the UK like Prynne or Barry McSweeney