With apologies to Sophie Mackintosh for the title.I am way behind on my reading as ever, I’m almost finished Ball Four which I wrote a bit about on the Baseball books thread. Yes, I’m cheating on you guys with the other ILB and I’m not remotely sorry. I have several other baseball books to read, but I want to read some fiction next. Reading all this nonfiction is unnatural to me and I spend a lot of time reading up on real events or watching YouTube clips of stuff depicted. Top of my list is Sophie Mackintosh’s Cursed Bread, which I now have a signed copy of, and Nicole Flattery’s debut novel is out this month as well. I’ve also got about six Ali Smith books and I need to finish Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour as I started it and remember liking it a lot. And the Elena Ferrante books have been calling my name a while now. And you?
― limb tins & cum (gyac), Friday, 24 March 2023 10:42 (one year ago) link
I have started properly reading RADIO BENJAMIN: a very extensive Verso collection of Walter Benjamin's writings for radio, from the late 1920s and early 1930s.
― the pinefox, Friday, 24 March 2023 11:38 (one year ago) link
Courtesy link to prior WAYR thread: Please use the receptacle provided: What are you reading as 2023 begins?
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 24 March 2023 16:05 (one year ago) link
Currently reading:
Nikolai Gogol - Dead SoulsI always thought that this would be darker since I associate it with the Joy Division song, or let's be real, the NIN cover, but it's really more of a hilarious romp.
Mezz Mezzrow - Really the BluesAbsolutely fantastic memoir about early jazz and occasional crimes, starting in the '20s. Almost every sentence has some wild turn of phrase or slang. I think it's out of print, it was a birthday gift.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of MemoryMy trashy sci-fi indulgence, third in the trilogy. I actually think he's improved as a writer, but at this point it's so wrapped up in the worldbuilding (literally, lol) of the first two books that some of it would be hilariously impenetrable if you hadn't read them. But that's unsurprising for a third act. I don't know if I could honestly recommend it as "good" but I sure am enjoying it.
― change display name (Jordan), Friday, 24 March 2023 16:49 (one year ago) link
Previously read this year:
Mat Johnson - Pym (decent & fun, good concept, ok writing & execution)Stanislaw Lem - The Futurological Congress (just delightful)Jonathan Lethem - The Arrest (decent, flawed but also probably his best in awhile?)Hernan Diaz - In the Distance (really enjoyed this on NA's recommendation, sort of a good-hearted and more conventional take on Blood Meridian)Katie Kitamura - Intimacies (sorry but thought this was pretty bad)George Saunders - A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (really enjoyed it, especially 'The Nose' which is what sent me on to Dead Souls)
― change display name (Jordan), Friday, 24 March 2023 16:52 (one year ago) link
just finished Bono - SURRENDER. liked the first half but the second half is less about the music and the band and more about activism and Steve Jobs this and Condi Rice that and kinda bored me, tho I did find it funny that he recalls cillian murphy ,by all accounts a close friend, telling him earnestly about how big a fan he was of their earlier records up until joshua tree which murphy loves but that they have since lost him.about to startNatsou Kirino - OUT which is about 4 women factory workers in Tokyo ,one of whom kills her husband and the others help her dispose of the bodyxpgyacs review of ball four in the baseball thread is great and made me want to read it.also someone asked if we had the nicole flatterly book today. we didn't and I've never heard of her. should I have?
― oscar bravo, Friday, 24 March 2023 21:57 (one year ago) link
I reviewed her short story collection here: Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022Her novel has had a few writeups in the Guardian, FT, etc, I hadn’t seen them till now cos I just preordered the book and it went onto my huge to-read pile. I personally liked her short story collection. You can read one of her stories here and see what you think.
― limb tins & cum (gyac), Friday, 24 March 2023 22:25 (one year ago) link
Reading Tracey Thorn's memoir *Bedsit Disco Queen*. Thorn's like Hatfield Rock: despite her self-deprecation, humility, her desire for a kind of present invisibility, she's like her EBTG lyrics: quietly wise and herself right to the bone - even as she's constantly admitting that self is a product of middle-England banality.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Friday, 24 March 2023 22:31 (one year ago) link
Whoa. Just read ' track' , thx for the link. Found it really funny but then felt bad for finding it funny. Very horrible and off-putting but in a compelling way. Will try to track down her collection from the library.
― oscar bravo, Friday, 24 March 2023 23:02 (one year ago) link
civilization of the Middle Ages, Norman cantor
― brimstead, Friday, 24 March 2023 23:03 (one year ago) link
I'm glad that someone else has been reading SURRENDER.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 25 March 2023 09:21 (one year ago) link
also someone asked if we had the nicole flatterly book today. we didn't and I've never heard of her. should I have?
I really enjoyed her short story collection Show Them a Good Time - very good contemporary Irish fiction. RIYL Colin Barrett. Her new one is a novel that sounds like it might be interesting:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/06/nothing-special-by-nicole-flattery-review-adventures-of-a-factory-girl
― bain4z, Saturday, 25 March 2023 09:56 (one year ago) link
I'm reading The Garden of the Gods, the third book in Gerald Durrell's series about his family's stay in Corfu. Which is to say I'm reading warmed over table scraps.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, 25 March 2023 16:23 (one year ago) link
Nadis and Yau, A History in SumWilson, The Difference Between God And Larry EllisonMeier, The Lost Spy
― alimosina, Sunday, 26 March 2023 00:55 (one year ago) link
Currently: Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (omg)
― dow, Monday, 27 March 2023 00:57 (one year ago) link
finished trollope's barchester towers the first novel of his i've read: had not expected his fiction to exhibit such a level of irony & occasional outright satire as this did... almost farcical in places
started on a reread of the moonstone and now somewhat tempted to explore some of wilkie collins' less known/regarded novels
― no lime tangier, Monday, 27 March 2023 05:06 (one year ago) link
Moonstone is a lot of fun.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 27 March 2023 09:35 (one year ago) link
i changed ereader half-way through and lost my place. haven't picked it up again.
― koogs, Monday, 27 March 2023 11:26 (one year ago) link
I finished Volume 1 of Principles of Psychology by William James (please clap). Unfortunately it was good enough that I will probably also need to read Volume 2. Introspection is an indispensable tool for thinking about how the mind works, which makes it worthwhile to pursue, despite the innate difficulties - e.g. the lack of well-defined consensual terms for mental phenomena, difficulties of observing oneself "in media res" since the act of observing by necessity takes one out of the activity that one sought to observe, etc.
― o. nate, Monday, 27 March 2023 16:02 (one year ago) link
Finished a little chap by Iain Sinclair, as well as one by Fred Spoliar and Maria Sledmere, as well as Ed Steck’s Sleep as Information/ The Fountain is a Water Feature, a strange book of poems dwelling in insomniac preoccupations.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Monday, 27 March 2023 16:08 (one year ago) link
I am now reading Andrew Crisell, AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF BRITISH BROADCASTING (1997). It shows a very fine analytical understanding, modestly and clearly expressed. I have never seen the basic relations between diverse media so succinctly defined.
― the pinefox, Monday, 27 March 2023 17:54 (one year ago) link
Today I started An Inventory Of Losses by Judith Schalansky
― touche pas ma planète (flamboyant goon tie included), Monday, 27 March 2023 21:07 (one year ago) link
I read REFUGEES: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION as a bit of swotting before a related job interview. The author is Gil Loescher, who had his legs blown off doing NGO work in Baghdad, the same bombing that killed De Mello. It's very useful, informed summary of the history and issues, cleanly written.
All of the VSIs I've read have been excellent - would gladly hear recommendations.
Also, as a bit of relief during a stressful month, I'm reading a 2003 kids' adventure book, BARTIMAEUS: THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND, which rules.
― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 27 March 2023 21:11 (one year ago) link
I considered buying THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION today. Maybe I wanted to learn the things that John Lanchester won't tell me.
― the pinefox, Monday, 27 March 2023 21:25 (one year ago) link
New York Review Books, in more evidence of their impeccable taste, published Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs, which I've picked up.
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 27 March 2023 21:32 (one year ago) link
I'm reading a 2003 kids' adventure book, BARTIMAEUS: THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND, which rules.
I have read this! And the sequel. With my 9-yo (at the time). It's true it's very well done (if you like that kind of thing)
― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 28 March 2023 09:10 (one year ago) link
I v much enjoyed doing the voice of Bartimaeus fwiw
― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 28 March 2023 09:14 (one year ago) link
Antonio Vieira - Six Sermons. I have wondered what might be a satisfying equivalent in Portuguese to Cervantes (Spanish), Rabelais (French), Boccaccio (Italian), Browne, maybe Grimmelshausen (German) and these Baroque sermons from the Portuguese priest might be it. They are full of eventful proserly flights that take in references from antiquity to a bunch of theologian medieval scribes to (of course) the Old Testament to deliver sermons that are meant to, in turns, cheerlead the troops in the fight against the Dutch, pacify slaves, to moralise left right and centre, to talk up Portuguese priests that should be Saints, etc. You sort of don't care what its in service of because it looks so good on the page.
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 28 March 2023 20:43 (one year ago) link
xpost
Good to know! Mine's only 3 years old so lots of time to practice the voice. Right now all my voices sound like Bernard Bresslaw for some reason.
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 28 March 2023 22:04 (one year ago) link
Wow, Cervantes and Rabelais?? That's a tall order for some sermons. I'll have to reread.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 29 March 2023 09:09 (one year ago) link
It has also set me on the direction of compiling Sermons to read. Donne for sure, don't know who else.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 29 March 2023 09:33 (one year ago) link
I've begun to read The Leopard, Di Lampedusa. I've noticed that ILB admires this book fairly unanimously and the ilx film mavens love the film extravagantly. Also, I seem to be past my bout of "light reading" and capable of something with a bit more fiber to it.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 31 March 2023 16:47 (eleven months ago) link
although it's pretty light, i must say
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 31 March 2023 16:49 (eleven months ago) link
compared to Bill Bryson it's bound to look like Melville
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 31 March 2023 17:57 (eleven months ago) link
Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive. The just released new translation from NYRB is a must. It's set just after the fascists have won the civil war in Spain and it's composed of a series of 1-2 page character sketches and conversations -- much of it in various bars and cafes in Madrid. Some characters and their fates are followed up on, others are not. Over and over again there are these grotesqueries laid out in a superb style. The pessimism is of the highest order.
Celine and Malaparte are cited at the back and you can see why. As all were either collaborators or kept working to the order of the day. But they all wrote some amazing pages and are dead so I'll read them.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 1 April 2023 11:02 (eleven months ago) link
i feel like i've been reading diana wynne jones's novel dark lord of derkholm for my whole life but probably a couple of weeks, i'm just slow.poetry-wise it's been dipping into some elizabeth-jane burnett (her book of sea) and the collected poems of r.f. langley & w.s. graham
― tambourine, Saturday, 1 April 2023 22:10 (eleven months ago) link
Camilo Jose Cela spoke at my commencement! He won an honorary degree. I remember his fierce Sam the Eagle profile and his denouncement of "las vicisitudes de la juventud."
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 1 April 2023 22:42 (eleven months ago) link
Sorry -- I just consulted my notes. It's worse lol. He denounced "las tonterías de la juventud." His address went down like a kick in the belly.
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 1 April 2023 22:47 (eleven months ago) link
lol bill bradley spoke at my commencement . . . about the horrors of the national deficit
everyone was like fuck you talk about basketball
― mookieproof, Sunday, 2 April 2023 00:45 (eleven months ago) link
I'm going to discuss The World and Everything That It Holds by Aleksander Hemon tomorrow morning with my book club. I'm predicting most of them won't have liked it. It is difficult but is pretty amazing. It is a tale of being a lifelong refugee, starting in 1914 with the assassination of archduke Ferdinand in Bosnia, and continuing from there into a prisoner of war camp in Galicia in western Ukraine, and eventually to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, Turkistan in Kazakhstan, and across the Gobi desert to Shanghai.
It is written in English, but with a lot of Bosnian and Spanjol (the diasporic Spanish sephardic equivalent of yiddish)
― Dan S, Sunday, 2 April 2023 01:05 (eleven months ago) link
I did finish Ball Four earlier this week and wrote about it here. Anyway, back to fiction! I started and finished Sophie Mackintosh’s new novel, Cursed Bread, within 24 hours. It’s short, but I could have done it faster: I kept going back to reread particular sentences that I loved.In the room he looked at the rose of damp on my ceiling, took off his brown raincoat.The book uses this event as a highly fictionalised backdrop: Mackintosh is not theorising on the real life event but draws from the mass hysteria and mystery. The narrator is Elodie, the baker’s wife. In common with some of Mackintosh’s short stories, some characters are named (Elodie, Violet, various Mmes) but mainly others are referred to by their roles (the ambassador, the grocer’s wife). This has the effect of giving it a fable-like feel, and also underlines the small-town setting of everyone. Every day Elodie sells bread to the townspeople and barely hears their secrets, is it a surprise that the names begin to blur and fade after a while?Mme F had launched into another complaint about Josette, how she would stop talking for days at a time, like an anchoress taking a vow of silence.Of course the antagonist of this book is Violet, who sometimes feels she should have her name in all caps: VIOLET. She is enigmatic and both desired and despised by the people of the town. There is a scene where the ordinary women are doing their washing at the lavoir, where Violet outsources this labour to older women, where they exclaim over the luxe and sexual items Violet has stained with her life, until they start trying them on and end up damaging some of the garments in a frenzy. It reminded me a bit of Malèna.They gather around me with wet cloth in their hands, drowned cloth, marked with blood that won’t wash out.Sex and longing for it permeates this book like the scent of bread baking weaves its way through a house. It’s there in Elodie’s constant yearning to be touched by her husband, who denies her both calmly and coldly until she is almost screaming. It’s there in Elodie and her husband watching outside the bedroom door. It’s there in Elodie‘s fantasies about Violet and the ambassador both, where it’s never quite clear if she desires them for themselves, or to be them, or both. I have read other people say that they don’t like the epistolary aspects of this book but I liked the way they are spliced through the present day narrative, so you are plunged from cloudiness and increased confusion into clarity and back again.I enjoyed this a lot, but it’s not for everyone.
― limb tins & cum (gyac), Sunday, 2 April 2023 13:08 (eleven months ago) link
Haha yeah I bailed on this a few pages from the ending because the oppressive, sordid misery just came to be too much. Def creates a mood though, and makes me think Franco's Spain was much like Salazar's Portugal - just grey miserable days in cafes nursing petty grievances because expanding your horizons is prohibited so this is all that there is.
― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 2 April 2023 15:00 (eleven months ago) link
In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, the earliest memory of Harry Crews is of waking up under a tree with his excellent dog Sam, both of them in early morning sunlight: he's a sleepwalker who's hit it lucky, in and out of place. The place, into which he now centered by tobacco farming, is late 30s Bacon County, Georgia, sometimes extending across the St. Mary's River into Jacksonville, Florida's Springfield Section of tiny shotgun row houses and cigar factories, with the youngest children, like himself, left to their own devices. In Bacon and the Section, he's the mostly the audience, including that of the glossy people in the Sears Roebuck catalog, so fantastically intact, unlike almost every one else he sees, that they must have wounds under their clothes: he and his friend Willalee and Willalee's grandmother, Auntie.a self-proclaimed conjure woman and ex-slave, tell each other stories about the Sears people: the audience continuing through the creative process.Little Crews also responds and is responded and susceptible to an increasing number of people, becoming "a parade" of vistors to his bedroom, when he's confined with "infantile paralysis" (nice work, Dr. Colombo). Many of these are people he knows or recognizes---though not the faith healer from the next county---in a new context, with him more an audience than ever, but for their attentions. Scary, especially when Aunties dropping knowledge, though things were already disturbing enough, hence the sleepwalking, and now he feels in place (for one thing, he can't wake up in a dark field, because he can't get there).The second session is even better: almost boiled alive, he now qualifies for actual treatment, by drying light and soothing spray (which becomes a protective coating) while he's under a protective shell, which he compares to the top of a carriage, with his Sears Roebuck Catalog and a tablet for his detective novel, about a boy detective who carries fireworks for protection. He's also allowed to keep an attentive baby goat in there---all things for the twice-struck child---Before, in between, and after these confinements, he can disappear like a tiny Ishmael, one whose reappearances become more self-revealing, traced in and out of place, for keeps---spoiler of sorts: a mind-fuck evangelist appears, an alibi of sorts, but a plausible one, as far as he goes, which is pretty far, in a professional way. Even I, Boomer suburbanite, was singed by one during a brief middle achool encounter, while preschool Crews and his crew get the extended treatment, as isolation's captive audience.There are what I take to be fictional outcroppings, but not much to stumble over. He learns from the stories of men (character-driven, funny) and women (action, cutting the surface)--the former told while taking a break, the latter not so much.
― dow, Monday, 3 April 2023 04:48 (eleven months ago) link
"Spoiler of sorts" because this kind of person is always likely to turn up/be drawn to this kind of setting (and of course is still very much with us in the Deep-Ass South: on radio, basic cable, antenna TV, the Internet, or otherwise as close as they, usually he, though always with an entourage, can get).
― dow, Monday, 3 April 2023 04:56 (eleven months ago) link
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 1 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink
The man was a bastard. Utterly unpleasant by the sounds of it.
― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 2 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink
I think a lot of that is to do with the poor/working class characters he is sketching. But yes it's striking how there is nothing like a hope for better, like there could be in a more communist novel of the period where even a character in jail is yearning for something bigger and better.
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 3 April 2023 09:09 (eleven months ago) link
I continue with Crisell's excellent, lucid, prim INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF BRITISH BROADCASTING.
― the pinefox, Monday, 3 April 2023 09:51 (eleven months ago) link
What A Plant Knows Daniel Chamovitzbook on the sense experience of plants. Pretty interesting and a quite fast read.Looks at a lot of stimulus reactions witnessed and experimented on plants.Looked like it could be interesting when I was walking around the library a couple of weeks ago. Glad I read it anyway.
Not A Nation of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortizher book on the US and settler colonialism which came out last year. Been wanting to read it since it was released. Got it a few weeks ago.
Racism ed Martin Bulmerbook of excerpts and essays from a lot of writers work on various aspects of the subject. Read some very good bits , have been cherrypicking so maybe should try reading it from start to finish or something.Book turned up in a library iin the next town over as I popped over there last week.
― Stevo, Monday, 3 April 2023 18:53 (eleven months ago) link
I finished DAMASCUS by Christos Tsiolkas over the weekend. It's the story of Saul (aka Saint Paul), told from multiple perspectives and set in a nasty, violent world. A lot of bodily fluids, a lot of raping, torturing and killing of children (a recurring theme is of parents leaving their unwanted newborns on the side of a mountain where they are eaten by wild animals). Tsiolkas is not a subtle writer, and keeps hammering in his themes and contrasts. But the book gives a good insight in the different early christian factions competing for dominion.
― ArchCarrier, Monday, 3 April 2023 19:25 (eleven months ago) link
I finished Tracey Thorn's *Bedsit Disco Queen*. It traces (yes) her life in suburban north London, the time with the Marine Girls and then the years through EBTG and, eventually, her leaving behind songwriting for motherhood. It might be odd to call it comforting, given her (and Watts') profiles, but it was absolutely that. She's great and wise company. The one thing I can't shake since finishing it is how relatively *easy* everything came to them. Thorn's style is quiet, understated and ironic and she uses understatement as a kind of corrective against smugness, I think; but what gets left out, what never gets examined, is the *talent* - that ineffable thing at the heart of her, that thing without which none of the *life* happens. There are various points in the book where the default line is 'so Ben and I wrote a bunch of songs', as if it was painting a bedroom. Maybe that process is as ineffable to her as to the rest of us and should remain off-stage, as it were, but I would have liked some discussion or acknowledgement of it.
Anyway, that sounds like a moan and it isn't. To speak of the ineffable, my other big takeaway from the book, and from having listened to a few interviews with her since, is that Thorn is *happy*.
I'm reading a Reacher book at the minute, which is as close to not-reading as reading gets and just about bloody perfect, thank you.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Tuesday, 4 April 2023 07:31 (eleven months ago) link
I think that with things like a year zero anybody can do it level paradigm shift era like punk which I think the Marine Girls came out of, or certainly came out of teh aftermath of the idea of talent is still deeply present. Like you find that people did not think their talents lay in that direction trying things out and finding they do, but you also find a lot of people who realise it's just not for them. Subsequently not advancing further because they can't really do anything along those lines and their talents do lie elsewhere.So you will find that people either can actually do something inventive with a lack of technique which will reveal areas of further investigation. Can do something coherent with words and melody or other structure that is worthy of further investigation and will also reveal something worthwhile. & you also get incoherent noise, cliche and lack of rhythm from others. THough conceivably one could do something semi interesting with that if one had talent to do so.Also you can have over educated players without an iota of creativity making identikit copies of current taste and not finding out what they do and do not actually like or feel really turned onto investigate in a creative way.So yeah would think talent was relevant even there , it's not as egalitarian as one would really like possibly.I just think punk and a couple of other scenes did turn things over so one didn't need to be completely schooled in how things 'should' be and allowed a lot more self expression and some of that stands the test of time and some of it was pretty self indulgent.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 10:13 (eleven months ago) link
I think it is also something taht a lot of people see as a point of complaint that punk became a point of orthodoxy in itself and ceased to be a broader church of creativity where everybody wasa really allowed to do their own thing as long as it wasn't being whatever e.g. hippy, prog, mainstream etc etc each of which probably have a number of examples worthy of interest anyway. BUt again that's down to creativity which is down to talent .|I think the dichotomy may be down to talent vs technique where up to a certain point one would think they were the same thing and a scene like punk or skiffle or whatever showed that they weren't. & overplaying is a negative etc.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 10:19 (eleven months ago) link
I think the broader issue arising from poster Chinaski's post is not re 'talent' as such, but that artists tend not to describe how they actually make the art, even though that's the thing that primarily makes them interesting to us.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 10:28 (eleven months ago) link
Africa is not a country : breaking stereotypes of modern Africa Dipo Faloyin Book from last year looking into the Western misconception that Africa is a single space not a full continent. Where there has been some thought that Africa is a monolith not a wide array of different cultures, peoples , geography etc. I think there is a related podcast too which is good.So far read the first 100 odd pages and finding it a really good read. JUst read about the white saviour BS of Bob Geldof concerning Ethiopia and how reductive and racist th songs he wrote in 1985 and 2015 were and how they actually avoided the actuality of the circumstances the songs were supposed to be representing. He's also looked at the artificiality of th 1895 conference that split up the African continent along totally fictional lines instead of any kind of geographic feature . & how this caused tribes who had been in the areas for centuries a great deal of damage. How the European powers did very little surveying and knew very little of the actual geography they were dividing. So remained with a totally abstract concept of what actually was represented.Great book.
plus way too many books picked up in charity shops which I hope I will eventually get through a load of . Probably need to organise better to make sure I know what I've got and can plan the to-be-read-next from.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 10:35 (eleven months ago) link
I think, Chinaski, a gap exists between Thorn and Watt's talents and how for almost fifteen years (!) they and/or their record label(s) misread the popular moment.
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 4 April 2023 11:50 (eleven months ago) link
I'm back to reading Tolkien (The Two Towers).
Previously in the last 40 days:- Yourcenar - Nouvelles Orientales- Laxness - Independent People- Borges/Bioy Casares/Ocampo - Antologia de la literature fantastica
I love everything Yourcenar touches so I'm not surprised she does violent traditional tales well. The core story of Bjartur the independent farmer in the most desolate valley of Iceland at the worst political time and with pretty bad weather was excellent, but enclosed in a four-part epic that does not really go anywhere. Still enjoyed it.I ordered the Antologia without thinking and didn't realize it would be a mix of short stories edited by those three giants, including a good deal from Anglo-Saxon authors. Turned out it was an excellent way to explore the fantastic genre, even if the stories are uneven. It's from 1940 so a pretty interesting cutoff, pre-SF, pre-Boom, and I appreciated that it includes all those micro-stories and extracts, some from the Antiquity, a single line from Joyce etc that gave the collection a nice rhythm.
― Nabozo, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 12:55 (eleven months ago) link
Actually, 1940 is not a strict cutoff but just the first edition I think, I had a doubt and randomly checked and La Casa Tomada by Cortazar for example is 1946.
― Nabozo, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 12:57 (eleven months ago) link
Is the single line 'What is a ghost?' and its answer - 'One who has faded away through change of manners' etc ?
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 13:08 (eleven months ago) link
Yes, and the Spanish sounds pretty good: "Qué es un fantasma ?" "Un hombre que se ha desvanecido hasta ser impalpable, por muerte, por ausencia, por cambio de costumbres".
There's another one immediatelly after which I assume is the apparition of Stephen's dead mother in the longest chapter of Ulysses: "I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead".
― Nabozo, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 13:17 (eleven months ago) link
It is.
"por cambio de costumbres" - marvellous!
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 13:59 (eleven months ago) link
I have it as The Book of Fantasy, with an introduction by Ursula K Le Guin---from Publisher's Weekly. re this 1988 edition:
Originally conceived of by its Argentinian editors in 1937, and now published in English for the first time, this unusual and provocative volume is an omnibus collection. In addition to stories by Ballard, Poe, Saki, Max Beerbohm, Ray Bradbury, May Sinclair, de Maupassant and Julio Cortazar, there are shorter pieces, anecdotes, folkloric fragments, dreamlike moments. Most of the 79 selections are only a paragraph or two long, giving us brief passage into magical visions of the world culled from the work of an international array of authors of the past three centuries, including less well-known authors such as Santiago Dabove, Edwin Morgan and Niu Chiao. The keynote tale may well be Borges's own "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in which an imaginary world, conjured up by manufactured documentation, ends up eroding our reality: reality is malleable, and imagination necessarily subverts and alters it.
Martin Chandler further specifies,in his Amazon reader's review:
...along with the deservedly famous selections such as The Monkey's Paw and The Man Who Likd Dickens, there are many stories even the most erudite fantasy reader may be unacquainted with. Some of the tales, such as The Story of the Foxes by Niu Chiao and the unsettling Guilty Eyes by Ah'med Ech Chiruani, are half page at most, but will implant themselves in the memory as effectively as the longer narrations. ("Guilty Eyes" is as durable as a poison oak seed.) Also present is a fine selection of Latin American fictions, with a focus on Argentine writers. Kafka' Josephine the Singer, Cocteau's The Look of Death, and Beerbohm's Enoch Soames sound straight out of the world of Borges, a tribute to the latter writer who managed to forge a world view at once deeply personal yet universal. Borges's own Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is included as well as a piece by the under-read Casares. All in all an indispensable collection, marred only by an astonishing number of typos. Buy it! (At 92 cents it's a steal.)
― dow, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 17:23 (eleven months ago) link
slogged through The Scarlet Letter. couldn't face the introduction (which was like 15% of the length of the book)
Gaskell's Ruth next
both were mentioned on the Wikipedia page for the book i had planned to read next, Trollope's An Eye For An Eye
― koogs, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 19:38 (eleven months ago) link
i literally used to read The Custom House as a sleep aid
― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 4 April 2023 21:15 (eleven months ago) link
Still, when travelling, getting through C.M. Kornbluth's densely packed book of short stories.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 10:02 (eleven months ago) link
Always thought of him as being one of the best, although haven't reading anything apart the standard anthology fare in ages.
― Beatles in My Passway (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 5 April 2023 13:01 (eleven months ago) link
Frequently bought togetherThis item: His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluthby C. M. KornbluthThe Iron Dreamby Norman Spinrad
― Beatles in My Passway (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 5 April 2023 13:24 (eleven months ago) link
Stevolende, you might try Paul Zollo's interviews compiled in Songwriters on Songwriting, especially the revised and expanded '03 edition, also More Songwriters on Songwriting Otherwise, in their own books and the general interest media, even most so-called music coverage, artists don't usually say that much about details of the songwriting process, beyond "human interest" (which can be entertaining enough: in Musician Magazine's How I Wrote That Song, the guy in the Hooters said he got tired of his wife going on about Leonard Cohen, so he wrote "One of Us," the Joan Osborne hit.)
But a lot of editors don't seem to want anything that indicates just how hard the work of art (and entertainment) can be, the choices and granular focus required---although they'll take the break-downs, the freak-outs from pressure of Fame etc.--nor, for the most part, do they trust even simple analysis---I had a friend who tried a a brief description of how a piece of "math rock" worked, back when that was a thing, and it was so simple that even math-challenged I understood it--and it was published, but so was a Letter To The Editor, trolling this elitist buzzkill etc., so he never tried that again, even though what he described was just the basis of the music's appeal: how listening worked for most of us, likely enough, whether we verbalized it or not (though I guess it might have been OK in more specialized publications, if expanded for musicology journals or Guitar World, say).
― dow, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 17:24 (eleven months ago) link
How I Wrote That Song was a series in Musician Magazine.
― dow, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 17:25 (eleven months ago) link
So, although I haven't read any of Thorn's books, I'm not surprised that she doesn't stick her neck out in talking abiyt that process, esp. with the usual reflexive English (not Brit) wry self-deprecating irony kicking in, protectively and expected, otherwise some would be going, ooooo, look at yooou---even more than goes on anyway (oh that old Tracey Thorn, at it again, who does she think she is)
― dow, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 17:32 (eleven months ago) link
About to dive into Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton. I don't know much about it--it is the pick of this month's book club host--but the blurbs sound encouraging. The reviews are very positive.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, 5 April 2023 17:49 (eleven months ago) link
Oh yeah, all that I've seen are v. favorable.xpost I did think that Jia Tolentino's New Yorker profile of Caroline Polachek, with research, interviews, studio observations, and post-Quarantine adjustments to live performance, provided an unusually good balance of process, motivation, more general concerns, without getting pedantic or soap operatic.
― dow, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 17:54 (eleven months ago) link
(also rec: JT's collection Trick Mirror, reflecting her adventures in reading and other activities.)
― dow, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 17:57 (eleven months ago) link
xp with 'talent' I was also thinking not talking about the process of creating may be a combination of a few things including nurtured modesty which seems like a very British stiff upper lip thing or a result of religious influences in upbringing. Or not wanting to talk about work which might have similar roots. As in don't talk about work when not at work and mixing with people who don't work in the same place etc which may be down to politeness but misses part of what the audience is actually interested in.Alternatively I have also come across various artists not wanting to dissect their working processes in fear that too close inspection mighty frighten off their muses. I think Pete Townshend said something way back about being asked about the creative process being analogous to asking a caterpillar how it walked meaning it looked at the process too closely and lost the ability to do so which is an anthropomorphic fable but illustrated something at the time he may have rejected later.
But I was thinking also that talent did have that connotation of being like a gold star pupil which I think was being rejected at the time of punk. & I thought would be conveyed by my talking about the year zero set up of the time. Talent and technique being thought to be inherently interconnected but may have needed further explanation. Just seemed to be somet6hing that was being intentionally rejected for a while,elitist idea of some people having the ability, eugenically or whatever and others not possessing 'it' being rejected to make things more egalitarian but it actually coming out that not everybody can do all things but more of the rejected having some unrecognised ability etc.& the idea of talent having a rarified connotation that meant it became a word that was rejected for a while at least and other 6things substituted. Like it being a really middle class notion that one either did or did not have 'talent' tied in with the myth of meritocracy and disguising other pressures and hurdles etc.
― Stevo, Wednesday, 5 April 2023 20:15 (eleven months ago) link
Those Zollo books are a must, as is his booklength Tom Petty interview.
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 5 April 2023 20:22 (eleven months ago) link
I'm reading The Children of Greene Knowe to my 7 year old, it's really beautifully written and a pleasure to read aloud. It's a kind of friendly ghost story with just the right amount of mystery and uncanniness. It reminds me of Tom's Midnight Garden, though that's aimed at slightly older kids and deals a bit more with weighty matters, this has required hardly any redacting or difficult explanations.
― ledge, Thursday, 6 April 2023 10:58 (eleven months ago) link
Tom's Midnight Garden tv adaptation traumatised a generation
― koogs, Thursday, 6 April 2023 12:18 (eleven months ago) link
(appaently i am thinking of "The Enchanted Castle")
― koogs, Thursday, 6 April 2023 12:23 (eleven months ago) link
I think there is a Children of Greene Knowe tv adaptation that I haven't seen. Was one of my first reactions on reading the title. Not sure how it compares but stuck in my head for some reason.
I know there is at least one Tom's Midnight Garden tv adaptation. I think I watched one in the mid 70s and think it has been done again since.
― Stevo, Thursday, 6 April 2023 12:24 (eleven months ago) link
Currently reading: "The Late Mattia Pascal" by Luigi Pirandello. As with some other novels I've read from the first decade or so of the 20th century, you can feel the intellectual ferment of the period pushing against the strictures of the realist novel in different ways, but still predating the modernist revolution that would come in the '20s with its style characterized by radical interiority. These are still third-person plot-driven novels. Cf. "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton, "Fog" by Miguel de Unamuno, or "The Golem" by Gustav Meyrink - all novels that ask big questions and push the envelope in different ways. Science had overturned our mental model of the universe and it wasn't clear where it would lead, occultism is a recurrent theme.
― o. nate, Thursday, 6 April 2023 21:41 (eleven months ago) link
i was pleased to read on the previous thread users bain4z and table enjoying diarmuid hester's dennis cooper book. i'm friends with diarmuid, though i've not seen him in a while and i thought the book was exceptional, the stuff on cooper's early career particularly. i was very surprised to read the material about ed dorn in there, not a poet i've spent much time with, but whose work i had enjoyed (his homophobia is mentioned on his wikipedia page but i'm sorry to say that i wasn't aware of it before reading it in this book). i did feel that diarmuid could have gone further in certain areas of cooper's fiction, the more transgressive aspects perhaps, but it's a major work that i'm very glad is finding some traction
i started jen calleja's 'vehicle', which i'm still just finding my feet with, it has quite a complex setup. i read some of evan isoline's 'dead math' and lyn hejinian's 'positions of the sun' in the last week.
i have also read some of joseph darlington's 'the experimentalists', which is about mid-century experimental writing in Britain. i have a few quibbles with it (my phd was in this area) and some of his aesthetic judgements, of the nouveau roman for example, are quite conservative given his subject matter, but it's a good overview and very readable in the main
also been dipping into geraldine kim's 'povel' - one of my favourites and as light and effortless as always
― dogs, Friday, 7 April 2023 15:26 (eleven months ago) link
Finally reading POND and digging it---asked this last year on main AQ thread and wondering again
I enjoyed reviews of Claire-Louise Bennett and her story recently in The New Yorker, also see that she's talked about Quin as inspiration and wrote intro for republished Passages, mentioned in passing upthread---how is it?? I'm inclined to start there, given the Bennett connection.― dow, Wednesday, September 28, 2022 11:48 AM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglinkQuin is a major intertext of Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19, which is highly recommended (by me).― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, September 28, 2022 11:51 AM
― dow, Wednesday, September 28, 2022 11:48 AM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink
Quin is a major intertext of Claire Louise Bennett's Checkout 19, which is highly recommended (by me).
― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, September 28, 2022 11:51 AM
― dow, Friday, 7 April 2023 18:04 (eleven months ago) link
I’m up to the 11th century Gregorian revolution in Cantor. What a buncha jerks.
― brimstead, Friday, 7 April 2023 18:39 (eleven months ago) link
berg probably the best place to start with quin. passages is the better novel but a harder nut to crack (claire-louise bennett flatters herself with the comparison; i found pond good in moments but a little flat). tripticks is my favourite ann quin novel, but that's a minority opinion i think. the story collection is good but quite mixed, i'd read the novels first
― dogs, Friday, 7 April 2023 19:10 (eleven months ago) link
started 'when we cease to understand the world' by benjamin labatut. the history of science not as linear progress or the best of human endeavour, but as the maniacal laugh of an mad god. I'm told it settles down a bit after the first chapter - we'll see - but what a first chapter.
― ledge, Friday, 7 April 2023 19:22 (eleven months ago) link
So far, Pond seems more good-to-amazing than flat, and measures of flatness provide pace, plot updates & effective contrast, also realness cred---thanks for Quin tips, and if she's that much better than Bennett, then I can't hardly wait.
― dow, Friday, 7 April 2023 20:44 (eleven months ago) link
I read Tayeb Salih's *Season of Migration to the North*. Despite the swirling, hallucinatory elements of the narrative, the central message hit hard and pure. Quite an experience.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Saturday, 8 April 2023 11:59 (eleven months ago) link
xxpost oh ha now I see what you mean, dogs: finished Pond last night, pulled along but the last part fizzled a bit, maybe should have ended sooner, just stopped, even---but I'll read at least part of it again, even though not so nec. since I know someone very much like the narrator, understand the thinking/way of life as well as my simple male mind can, but can't so far accept that this book's most compellingly visionary passages go with penultimate or ultimate fizzle, not in the way they seem to now---maybe it doesn't matter so much, considering the best stuff, but certainly demonstrates the hazards of this kind of literary approach (though I like that the narrator seems as criticism-damaged as art-damaged, prob more: "The text is the pretext" and so on).Seems like I've heard that Checkout-19 is better?
― dow, Saturday, 8 April 2023 18:16 (eleven months ago) link
I think Checkout 19 is certainly richer in its texture - weaves together many different modes of memoir, fantasy, litcrit, prose poetry even.
― Piedie Gimbel, Sunday, 9 April 2023 10:47 (eleven months ago) link
Is Pond the one where she compares the sound of frogs croaking in the night to her vagina or vice versa
― limb tins & cum (gyac), Sunday, 9 April 2023 11:24 (eleven months ago) link
I've almost finished the second volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles bio and at the bookshop yesterday I bought Camilo José Cela's The Hive
― the very juice and sperm of kindness. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 9 April 2023 11:41 (eleven months ago) link
the river at green knowe, sequel to the children of... that came in the same volume from the library, starts off unpromisingly with a chinese boy who when asked his name gives a gurgling sigh - apparently it's unpronounceable in english, though it's spelled hsu, so they call him ping instead. he speaks english just fine though and behaves like a normal (i.e. english) polite child. he has almond eyes, obviously, or even worse, slit eyes.
― ledge, Sunday, 9 April 2023 15:26 (eleven months ago) link
xxpost. Fraid so--but some of it's better!
― dow, Sunday, 9 April 2023 17:48 (eleven months ago) link
There is a certain jive, gimmick factor, the more I think about it----
― dow, Sunday, 9 April 2023 17:49 (eleven months ago) link
But you could say that about a lot of books, music, visuals that are timeworthy anyway---on to Check-Out 19, at some point---prob after Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson--where should I start with him?
― dow, Sunday, 9 April 2023 17:57 (eleven months ago) link
i liked when we cease to understand the world, but i read it pretty soon after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb, and it suffered in the comparison.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, 10 April 2023 00:24 (eleven months ago) link
^ Read Jonathan Coe's biography of Johnson. It's a work of art.
― alimosina, Monday, 10 April 2023 01:19 (eleven months ago) link
I'm not exactly charging my way forward through The Leopard, but I am enjoying the author's nod-and-wink attitude that while his pampered aristocrats are real humans with real emotions, they are not to be taken very seriously.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 10 April 2023 02:30 (eleven months ago) link
Starting with B S Johnson: Christie Malay’s Own Double Entry is probably the most fun and the zippiest but The Unfortunates is his greatest IMO (it also changed my life but that’s another matter). Agree that the Coe biog is v good.
― Tim, Monday, 10 April 2023 08:29 (eleven months ago) link
work's been very much getting in the way of posting here, annoyingly, so am playing catch up:
finally read the crying of lot 49. a surprising book not to have read, for me, but god it's good to have books to which you suddenly remember you're looking forward look forward reading stored up. read it at the same time as there is no anti-mimetics division by qntm yes qntm no i don't know. silly really.
i can't find the ilx post about the short, crowd-funded film SCP Overlord, but it's good, as is their other film SCP Dollhouse, and so apparently is the recent multiplayer online game, and in general so is the SCP project itself. Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror updated for the digital media and CSI age, strong elements of PKD.
An open wiki project with crowdfunding for larger projects might not be expected to generate good quality writing, but the management of canon and tone is loose enough and defined enough to allow for creativity and playfulness.
As is often the case, the consideration of books you're reading at the same time shapes your observations about each of them. Here, how to discover and analyse something that is hidden, something that is hidden deliberately, is a motive force across both. TCoL49 like all Pynchon is very much a sentimental, quixotic journey, where the sentimental processes and associations play out not just across interpersonal connections and the acquisitions of direct experience, but substantially around the edges of and at a distance from the objects in play. Discovery and insight are not derived purely from the mechanisms of memory, experience and interaction, but somewhere just beyond, conveyed via esoteric mechanisms and objects (eg the stamp collection itself), including play, jokes and song.
This 'sentimental journey' view was very much brought to the fore by reading TINAMD at the same time, which is the opposite of this: a story where the possibility of sentimental association is weaponised by a malignant alien entity. The historical narrative of the scientific governmental community (the anti-memetics division) set up to battle it. Awareness and discovery of this entity enables it to flourish and memetically reproduce, and in doing strong destroy affect and empathy, it attacks, takes over and ultimately destroys the sentimental capability in society and people. History and learning are erased. The process by which the scientific team manage is forming a memetic cordon sanitaire between contained entities and the outside world, making it impossible for any analysis or memory of the entity to be retained outside the cordon.
The consequences of this are visible on the page, Pynchon's text is dense, rich and allusive, TINAMD's pages are regularly interrupted by blacked out chunks of text, sometimes forming an entire tombstone on the page, representing thoughts that have been deliberately forgotten or erased, leaving the ability to discern what is in them only by the shape of their absence. Of course an entire page blacked out reminds the reader of Sterne, that other quixotic, sentimental writer.
TCoL49 is by far the richer, more humane and enjoyable book, but then TINAMD is not working in that vein and is very good in its own right. Its aesthetic is narrow, and it's a B-movie, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the epistemic age.
the structure, which is after all only the compilation of a set of wiki entries, is lopsided, but that's fine tbh. The ending is ludicrously rushed, with a full on deus ex machina staging to weave together to conclusion the impossible threads, but the very final chapter is also charming and quite sweet.
― Fizzles, Monday, 10 April 2023 08:41 (eleven months ago) link
Hey, take it over to the book crying of lot 49
― Beatles in My Passway (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 10 April 2023 08:48 (eleven months ago) link
oh lol i did not realise that was there. thank you.
reading it made me want to revisit gravity's rainbow, which i might do next tbh.
― Fizzles, Monday, 10 April 2023 10:47 (eleven months ago) link
No worries. That was more of a Random homework googler memorial thread than a serious discussion.
― Beatles in My Passway (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, 10 April 2023 10:54 (eleven months ago) link
Dipo Fayolin Africa IS Not A Country Overview of the continent of Africa historically and over the years since Independence in the late 20th century.Looks at a lot of Western misnterpretation and misrepresentation and problems internal to AfricaPretty good I thought, recommended. Pretty lighthearted considering the subject matter.
Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of black Hollywood Donald Bogle, Hisory of Black Hollywood looking at major figures. I just read teh chapter on the 1910s which looks at Madam Sul-Te-Wan who was a travelling actress etc when she turned up in Hollywood with an introduction letter to D.W. Griffith who became a lifelong friend. I thought his major work would have meant he was an out and out racist but he helped her out. She appears in a number of his films and then in a load of other early Hollywood films I think into the talkie era.Also looked at Noble Johnson who appears to have been a bit of a jack of all trades who wound up as an actor and running his own company in film. I think I had a different book by the same author recommended in a bibliography, possibly from a Graham Lock book. If his other books are as good as I'm finding this I think I might read through a few more.
Not A Nation of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortizher book on settler colonialism. She started pointing out major discrepancies between the popular image of Hamilton in the wake of the broadway show and the actuality of the snobbish, slaver and Federalist society member. NOw gone on to the history of the Ulster Scots who were one of the main groups of settler colonialists in the history of the US.I like her writing and want to read through the rest of it.
― Stevo, Monday, 10 April 2023 11:04 (eleven months ago) link
donald bogle's work was often cited approvingly when i was at sight & sound -- i think he's pretty highly regarded
― mark s, Monday, 10 April 2023 11:59 (eleven months ago) link
𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek) at 1:24 10 Apr 23i liked when we cease to understand the world, but i read it pretty soon after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb, and it suffered in the comparison.I'll check it out. As a 'non fiction novel' I think wwctutw is incredible. At first I thought, what even is a non fiction novel? It reads like fairly standard history of science, telling a wild but plausible sounding story. But then, unless the writer had access to incredibly detailed diaries, a few creative liberties are taken with showing characters' thoughts and feelings. Now towards the end I don't know what is real and what is just flights of fancy. If you'd told me that before I started I might turned my nose up but it makes for stunning reading. And it's pretty good at getting the basics of quantum theory across without delving into technical detail.
― ledge, Monday, 10 April 2023 12:18 (eleven months ago) link
iirc the chapters get increasingly fictional(?) as the book progresses.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, 10 April 2023 12:59 (eleven months ago) link
I continue to read Crisell on broadcasting. Seems to be taking me a long time but I suppose I'm reading much else also. The book is terrifically lucid, enjoyable. It's up to about 1972 now.
I finished THE BEST OF C.M. KORNBLUTH. 330 dense pages of SF stories. Impressive imagination and stylistic efficiency. The last story, 'Two Dooms', directly anticipates or maybe influences THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.
I read half of John le Carré's SILVERVIEW. I'll read the second half when I can find a local library open.
And at last, after telling myself I'd do it for years, I've started on a book of French stories with parallel English text, first published 1972. The idea, for me, is to read a para or even a page in French, then check it against the English, which is a very reassuring safety net. On one hand the number of French words I don't know is remarkably vast. On the other, the very Rohmer-esque story I'm currently reading has a simple, almost adolescent sort of style that is much easier than some other written French, and I can read stretches of it without assistance, which makes a change from the first story, whose agricultural idiom made half the paragraphs obscure to this reader.
― the pinefox, Monday, 10 April 2023 14:14 (eleven months ago) link
that history of british broadcasting looks extremely good. will have to read.
― Fizzles, Monday, 10 April 2023 14:49 (eleven months ago) link
i’ve been reading textbooks of broadcast engineering recently (usually written from a US/SMPTE perspective) and this looks like it would be a good complement.
― Fizzles, Monday, 10 April 2023 14:51 (eleven months ago) link
Fizzles, it's 'basic' in a way but that's fine and for most of us, even something basic is revelatory.
It's written in a marvellously old-fashioned way which is precise, fastidious and informative. The author talks about 'rock music' as though peering at it while holding it in a pair of tweezers. Which is odd as he's a baby-boomer himself.
It's refreshing to read a version of cultural history that isn't centred on the present and its ways of seeing, but takes you back to how people were thinking in 1930, 1940, 1950, et al. One other fine aspect of the book is that it's conceptual, for instance on ideas of live vs recording and their implications for what broadcasting really was.
― the pinefox, Monday, 10 April 2023 14:55 (eleven months ago) link
i think i need basic! and also that it’s a good approach generally. questions of live and recorded - as well as numerous other questions like it! - still have a huge impact on commercial models and the shape of the industry.
― Fizzles, Monday, 10 April 2023 14:58 (eleven months ago) link
Caves Of Steel, Isaac Asimov, for a book group - so far I'm not really sure what in this book is supposed to be dystopia and what is for the author utopia that just sounds dystopian to me. but since it's a mystery as well as sci-fi I think things will clear up.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 10 April 2023 15:01 (eleven months ago) link
When We Cease to Understand the World was one of my favorite reads of last year. It does get increasingly fanciful as it progresses but possibly best to approach it like one would a Werner Herzog documentary.
― Chris L, Monday, 10 April 2023 15:23 (eleven months ago) link
fwiw THE CAVES OF STEEL is one of my favourite SF novels.
And I'd say that insofar as it's either utopia or dystopia, it's the latter. (Human beings are no longer able to go outside their dome and walk over grass for an hour?) But more neither, more a sense of 'mundane future'.
― the pinefox, Monday, 10 April 2023 15:26 (eleven months ago) link
Having read I, Robot I assume Asimov's sympathies lie more with the robot-friendly Spacers than the anti-robot Earthers (including bigoted protagonist), but the Spacer's hardline anti-immigration stance seems Not Great, even if there's a very compelling in universe explanation.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 10 April 2023 15:32 (eleven months ago) link
Lots of good new posts busting out all of a sudden (also some good 'uns over the years on that xpost Crying of Lot 49 thread). Thanks for all the B.S. Johnson recs. Now starting Isaac's Storm, in which 1900 science and politics and biz and other interests encounter a huge-ass hurricane ripping Galveston, a place I knew nothing about---only knew of coastal Texas culture re industrial Port Arthur as homeplace of Janis Joplin---this island city was depicted by boosters as a worker's'family's paradise, but the climate, like other factors, was pretty mavericky all along. Data-rich from the beginning, but also there I was put off by "non-fiction novel" scene-setting, although the world-building takes over as fact and fiction, plus the author, pop history veteran Erik Larsen, had the memoir of meteorologist Isaac Cline to draw from, as well as many other sources frequently sited in endnotes, so looks like it will go OK.
― dow, Monday, 10 April 2023 17:43 (eleven months ago) link
world-building takes over my attention span, that is, and so far it's fact *over* fiction, an impression encouraged by skimming ahead.
― dow, Monday, 10 April 2023 17:47 (eleven months ago) link
Got the new Nicole Flattery out of the library but wasn't doing it for me, so I've started:
William Gaddis - Carpenter's GothicClemens Meyer - While We Were DreamingMissouri Williams - The Doloriad
― bain4z, Tuesday, 11 April 2023 09:32 (eleven months ago) link
Recently finished Canadian poet Colin Smith’s 8x8x7, a 2008 book that feels written in a mode that is no longer popular but which was very influential to me as a young poet— manic, winking, absolutely withering hard left politics. It was nice to read, tho it offered little in terms of form. Have also read some other poetry books, and of course, Prynne reading group continues. Not sure what’s next!
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Tuesday, 11 April 2023 11:31 (eleven months ago) link
Crisell's history of broadcasting takes a slightly unexpected turn into proposing that while TV has done some good, it has also been harmful to people's ways of seeing the world, and has affected how they act. It's very close to what David Thomson has very long argued about film, though I don't think Crisell realises this.
I can go along with much that Crisell says, except when he seems to say that the emotive nature of TV means that direct action and protest groups like CND or Greenpeace get beneficial treatment from it. Those groups have historically been viewed as subversive (have been infiltrated by Mi5, contained by police, etc), and I don't think it's true that such groups do or did get favourable TV coverage. No more, of course, did trade unions.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 11 April 2023 11:35 (eleven months ago) link
Read Jean d’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace this morning, a book translated from French and Haitian creole. Interesting and depressing, full of elemental images (blood, dirt, glass, water, heat, saliva, etc). He has a new book of fiction out that has been getting some decent reviews.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Tuesday, 11 April 2023 14:21 (eleven months ago) link
I finished Crisell's book. He goes up to 1997 - Channel 5 has launched! - and is, to my eyes, prescient and bold in his predictions of the multi-channel, interactive future in which TV, radio, telephone, computer - and he adds, fax machine, CD player, VCR - might all converge into one 'apparatus'. For many people you could say that has turned out to be the 'phone'.
It's impressive that someone as cautious as Crisell is also so forward-looking, though the future he sees is not entirely positive. Actually what surprises me is how things have changed less than he expects. He says that the BBC licence fee may well be abolished in 2001! He also implies that in the near future broadcasting channels may be replaced by interactive modes like 'near video on demand'. That would be close to iPlayer or similar services. But compared to what Crisell posits, we still have dozens of broadcast channels beaming out somewhat 'mixed programming' - drama, travel programmes, documentaries. And the audience share for the old 4 channels that we had up to 1997 seems to have held up better than he would have predicted.
Two reflections that came to me were:
1: I am used to an 'era of neoliberalism' in which everything is always privatized and good decisions are never made. But if you look at broadcasting it's then surprising how often such decisions have been averted, and ideas of public service have been maintained. Even at the very start of the BBC, it moved from a more commercial arrangement to a more public one. BBC2 could have been ITV2 instead. ITV was given a much stronger public service remit from the early 1960s. Channel Four might have been ITV2 rather than the bold alternative channel it was. In 1986, the Thatcherite Peacock report proposed privatizing R1 and R2! - and it didn't happen.
2: On the other hand, it also seems to me that every time a new channel is started with high aims, it quite soon gets diluted. BBC2 is one. Channel Four another: after 1993 it has to sell itself more to advertisers and it sheds much of the minority programming / political / independent character that made it such a distinctive part of 1980s culture. Presumably no-one who doesn't remember the 1980s now thinks of C4 in those terms at all? BBC4 then repeats the pattern, supposedly a home for high culture stuff, then turned into an OK channel for documentary and music repeats. Even 6music is going through a like pattern, though it could be said that 6music's original indie-rock identity was too narrow - still, it's now shedding diverse and thoughtful programming to chase audiences. It seems that attempts to maintain locations for 'quality' in traditional broadcasting have never lasted. (Maybe it can be said that cable producers have actually ended up producing higher quality, in drama.)
I'm glad finally to have read Crisell's book. Media is still so pervasive a part of our lives, a historical perspective is good to have.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 13 April 2023 09:35 (eleven months ago) link
I wanted to carry on reading something that would be broadly and conceptually enlightening and clarifying on an area of interest to me - so on the shelf I found Wellek and Warren's THEORY OF LITERATURE (1949; third edition 1963). It's dry and stern in a way that would be alien to most critics and teachers now (though I suppose academic literary discourse is still notorious for abstraction and jargon, in a different way).
By page 20 we've reached the great chestnut: 'What is literature?'
― the pinefox, Thursday, 13 April 2023 09:39 (eleven months ago) link
David Olusoga The Kaiser's HolocaustThe story of teh German colony in South West Africa and its extremely detrimental effect on the native population.Just got through the Nama people being sent to an International Fair in Berlin where they had been exp0ected to put on supposedly native dress instead of the Western suits and Boer like military uniforms they were used to. They refused and a lot of teh Berln populatio were pretty smitten. After having had the primitive image of African natives presented as the reality some of them began to quesion things. Shame they weren't the ones who prevailed. Namaland became a hell on earth under German control.
― Stevo, Thursday, 13 April 2023 14:33 (eleven months ago) link
My reading club is going to read 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. Do I need to know anything beforehand, or should I just dive in?
― ArchCarrier, Thursday, 13 April 2023 14:39 (eleven months ago) link
it tolls for thee
― koogs, Thursday, 13 April 2023 14:46 (eleven months ago) link
― ArchCarrier,
You gotta get used to the thees and thous
― retrofuturist cop slayer! (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 13 April 2023 14:46 (eleven months ago) link
would a basic history of the Spanish Civil War be useful?
― Stevo, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:24 (eleven months ago) link
maybe Geography of Spain too?
― Stevo, Thursday, 13 April 2023 16:26 (eleven months ago) link
― ArchCarrier, Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:20 (eleven months ago) link
I'm not sure if I've actually read it. Do know I've seen the Gary Cooper/Ingrid Bergman film version a few times.Probably have at least one copy of it lying around the flat somewhere.So not sure exactly what added background you need. Would think overview of the recent history and possibly the geography of the area might be useful.If there are things taht contrast with the wider held understanding of events or anything.
― Stevo, Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:42 (eleven months ago) link
just dive in. if something seems unclear then do a bit of outside reading to situate yourself. wikipedia would prob be good enough. the novel was meant to be popular reading among a general audience.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Thursday, 13 April 2023 17:55 (eleven months ago) link
May depend on the extent of discussion within the reading club as to what extra background you would want. It's mno longer recent history, not sure to what extent the man in the street was aware of events in the Spanish Civil War at the time either. I know its an area that has a lot written about it from different political perspectives. I have a book by Antony Beevor on the whole war that I've yet to read
― Stevo, Thursday, 13 April 2023 18:22 (eleven months ago) link
Wellek & Warren's THEORY OF LITERATURE is mostly the kind of thing I enjoy. It's surprisingly easy to read. Its style is austere in a way almost unimaginable now. The authors, I'm afraid, often rap other scholars over the knuckles for deviations from correct thought about literature. Of course they have a vast range, from ancient Greece to Goethe and just about up to modern times (though they very rarely mention C20 authors).
On the face of it, they're assembling a unified theory of literature. Sounds good. And yet, as they proceed, one doubt I have is ... how *logical* is their procedure? They seem to *tour* an issue, rather than quite to argue their way through it to a final position. The text is thus rangier than you'd think.
But things get truly odd when we reach PART TWO: PRELIMINARY OPERATIONS. Part Two starts with Chapter Six: 'The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence'. This turns out to be basically about textual editing, making sure you have the right text in front of you, etc. Very important. Proper scholarship. But how does it fit into this particular book? It stands out very strangely. It's not that there aren't 'theoretical' questions about editions. Certainly there are. But W&W's way of talking about editing is often like a bland 'how-to': 'In preparing an edition, one should keep firmly in mind its purpose and its presumed public'. Somehow they have wandered off from their grand project of a THEORY OF LITERATURE into something else, as though mislead by the all-inclusiveness of the project. They might as well start telling us that we can write about literature either with a fountain pen, or a typewriter - different tools will be appropriate to different occasions.
And then you realise that Chapter Six, which is only 12 pages, is the ONLY chapter in PART TWO !! This structure is crazy!
The good news is that overall, the book is fun to read if, like me, you like this kind of thing. Whether I will emerge with a unified THEORY OF LITERATURE, I am less sure.
― the pinefox, Friday, 14 April 2023 10:07 (eleven months ago) link
I'm currently reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, continuing my tour of fin-de-siecle fiction. The plot itself seems a bit melodramatic. I guess the book is mainly of interest today as a showcase for Wilde's deft way with an aphorism and the none-too-subtle gay subtext.
― o. nate, Friday, 14 April 2023 20:13 (eleven months ago) link
The dialogue's cute.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 14 April 2023 20:17 (eleven months ago) link
Lots of good lines, but dialog seems a bit one-sided, with everyone else setting up softballs so Lord Wotton can come back with the wicked bon mots.
― o. nate, Friday, 14 April 2023 20:38 (eleven months ago) link
On the French Revolution thread Vegemitegrrl enthused about A New World Begins, Jeremy Popkin, so I found a library copy and have started it. It clocks in at ~550 pages, so I may not be coming up for air much in the next few weeks.
This promises to be the most comprehensive treatment of that revolution I've yet read. I agree with the idea that the French Revolution not only bequeathed the world with a new and very different era of politics from any seen before, but also swiftly manifested most of the political problems that have emerged throughout that era.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 14 April 2023 21:35 (eleven months ago) link
Yay! It’s about as engaging and easy a read as can be made of such a complex & dense period. He does a good job of weaving in pertintent first-hand accounts too here & there, which helps add some immediacy imo
― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, 14 April 2023 21:58 (eleven months ago) link
The novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is an dense and entertaining book. I listened to it on audible once and want to listen to it again.
― Dan S, Saturday, 15 April 2023 00:32 (eleven months ago) link
Wellek & Warren proceed to a section on THE EXTRINSIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF LITERATURE, which will be followed by a longer section on INTRINSIC APPROACH. I am starting to sense that what this book is trying to do is whittle away what they consider irrelevances to get to the real core of literary study. I daresay there is a name for this, in ancient Greek dialogues or whatever - a mode of argument in which you keep on considering x,y and x, politely recognising some value in them, while dismissing as much as possible. There is logic here, but I also sense that the method may reductive; that if the mission is to cut down the things we should say about literature, it may prove self-denying and impoverishing.
Simply put, I am also realising that the whole book may be a manifesto for what was called New Criticism, which declared only 'intrinsic study' worthwhile. Yet it is worth adding that when you actually read major New Critics, including W&W, they are striking for the breadth of their knowledge - they do know authors' biographies, letters, literary history, perhaps broader history. They don't exclude out of mere ignorance.
Much of what W&W say appears factual. They make statements that are almost incontrovertible, like 'Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a social creation' (p.94). Much of the time, then, the question is, when will they say something that can be argued against? They do break cover enough for this to happen. In 'Literature and Psychology' they spend much time talking about rather irrelevantly extreme ideas of writers / artists as exaggerated psychological types. They print the sentence: 'With the artist, in any medium, every impression is shaped by his art; he accumulates no inchoate experience' (p.86). This is clearly false. Artists are just people. They have roughly the same amount of inchoate experience as everyone else.
The first page of that chapter also brings a moment that quite shocked me. They are talking, rather absurdly, about artists having 'deformities' - 'Byron had a club foot', etc - and this being an influence on their psychology. Some might already dislike this. But then they say: 'Proust was an asthmatic neurotic of partly Jewish descent' (p.81). In context, it is hard not to take 'partly Jewish descent' as another unfortunate deformity. It's incredible that they could write this in 1949, and reprint it in 1963. The best I can say is that the posited problem would lie not with Proust but with other, anti-semitic people; Proust, 'partly Jewish', was 'handicapped' by others' racism. Perhaps. But W&W don't say this, and leave the more obviously bigoted implication standing.
Leaving aside individual moments like this, the book is slightly disappointing me, I suppose in being less focused than I'd hoped; unless the focus is, as I suggested, just on clearing away false ideas. Yet it remains of interest.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 15 April 2023 11:37 (eleven months ago) link
^ the critics critiqued. lovely bit of exegesis there pinefox.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, 15 April 2023 16:55 (eleven months ago) link
― Dan S,
It's teased me at the bookstore for almost a year, thanks to the typically excellent New York Review Books' striking cover.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 15 April 2023 16:58 (eleven months ago) link
New Criticism has always had some appeal for me insofar as the "intrinsic" fallacy insists on the primacy of the art object, of artist's personality, sensibilty, voice, generating and generated by what we perceive in the audience experience, as a reader, listener, viewer---although, while reading, listening, viewing we can't unsee etc. associations from what else we know of the artist's life, of life itself (that's why intrinsic is a fallacy, or just not true to life, and so your authors go on to amateur psychology, as you describe).But the appeal is in the counter-tendency to letting the art get buried in biographical elements, as so often happens: judging the artist only or primarily in terms of problematic/plain shitty behavior for instance, and dismissing them or playing up the most shocking bits.
― dow, Saturday, 15 April 2023 20:56 (eleven months ago) link
That's pretty much what I said last week re frustrations in music journalism, sorry for rehash.
― dow, Sunday, 16 April 2023 01:51 (eleven months ago) link
Thanks Aimless - appreciated.
I am coming to think that W&W, despite being so sternly sober, are vulnerable to a quite simple counter-argument, which would be something like: 'Content is not extrinsic to literature'.
Their project of stripping away everything non-essential leads them to wanting to list only purely literary devices - metre, for instance - as the heart of literary study. There is something convincing about this or about all such projects of radical reduction and definition. But we know that literature is suggestive because it uses language, which is referential. Isn't it the case that Middlemarch isn't just 'an 800-page novel divided into 40 [or whatever] chapters', but 'a novel of the English C19, set in the 1820s and published in the 1870s?'. We can't experience Middlemarch *without* its social content - it's 'intrinsic' to what the text is. I sense that W&W don't want to see this.
On the other hand, they are quite good at disposing of 'Zeitgeist' ideas, hulking old German books that argue that every work of art in a given age must express the same spirit. W&W are soberly able to take down such fantasies - and as such, they are not so conceptually far from the Althusser, in LIRE LE CAPITAL (1965), who was arguing for a more differentiated view of social process rather than one where everything at every moment expressed the same thing.
At the start of their section on INTRINSIC STUDY, W&W start on some really wacky ideas. They say: 'We need to work out what a poem actually is. Where is it?', and they say 'You might think a poem is on paper, but actually, if you think about it, you could destroy every paper copy but if someone still remembered it in their head, the poem would still exist!'. It could be a hippy meditation.
It also occurs to me that a creative writer - maybe a poet or an SF author - could turn the tables by writing a literary work somehow containing and reusing all this stuff. I can imagine a Donald Barthelme story, certainly a John Barth one, THEORY OF LITERATURE. I think of the quite striking Lethem story 'The Dytopianist [...]', which takes literary discourse from outside to inside the story.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 16 April 2023 10:03 (eleven months ago) link
I read *Time Will Darken It* by William Maxwell. Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker for the best part of 40 years in the middle of the last century and edited Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, John Updike and Elizabeth Taylor amongst others. This is to say, he has an extraordinary facility with structure and restraint, holding back, holding back. The book isn't about very much: a nondescript Illinois town in 1912; a central character tortured by manners and reticence with a thin marriage, which is disrupted by a visit from a rambunctious southern family. Maxwell uses multiple viewpoints to tell the story and seems to know each character intimately - almost to the point of voyeurism in places. What unfolds is born of these simple ingredients and feels utterly inevitable.
In a way, the plot Maxwell has chosen, and the particular traits of the characters he draws, are like an analogue for the novel form itself. What is not said lays like sediment, an unconscious layer, thickening like the night waiting to enclose the reader. The final few chapters are pretty shattering.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Sunday, 16 April 2023 18:29 (eleven months ago) link
The Folded Leaf is one of my favorite American novels
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 16 April 2023 18:30 (eleven months ago) link
I've only read this and *So Long, See You Tomorrow*. I clearly need to read everything. Have you read any of the letters? Am tempted by his correspondence with Elizabeth Taylor.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Sunday, 16 April 2023 18:39 (eleven months ago) link
Also reading *Stepping Stones*, a series of interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll. The interviews were mostly conducted by email, and are organised chronologically. It functions like an autobiography, with Heaney clearly treating it like an excavation, dredging memories from deep in his unconscious. Of what I've read so far, the book is full of beautiful details of his early life in Mossbawn and the Wood, the farm they moved to when Heaney was in his early teens.
It's also full of rich insight into his creative process, which, unsurprisingly, given the nature of his work, he frames with lots of digging and dredging metaphors. He also talks a lot about 'self-forgetting' and hints at the dissolution of the ego. I was surprised to note no mention of Freud in the index. It would be good to ask someone who knows more about Heaney whether this is a deliberate omission, or whether O'Driscoll simply didn't frame any questions that way (perhaps neither are interested!).
I hesitate to use the word (small c) conservative because, given my relative ignorance of Irish history, it feels clumsy and ugly but the picture of Heaney that emerges is kind of *that*. I think a good deal of it is his self-deprecation but, his facility with deep time aside, he seems to me a master of the local - social, cultural, emotional. He is, by his own admittance, completely unmusical, and despite growing up around Dylan and Leonard Cohen etc, felt nothing for them and, for all those riverine and fishing metaphors, has been 'on about a dozen riverbanks' in his whole life. It seems he found what he was good at, and did it like Hercules. Which, thank goodness.
Anyway, it's wholly fascinating.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Sunday, 16 April 2023 19:01 (eleven months ago) link
I love Time Will Darken It! also recommend So Long, See You Tomorrow on a shattering, William Maxwell tip.
― horseshoe, Sunday, 16 April 2023 19:43 (eleven months ago) link
reading The Last Samurai btw; it rules
I like STEPPING STONES, indeed. It must be one of the single most useful resources for understanding any particular writer.
I agree with the description except that it never seemed Freudian to me. I suppose that like Heaney and O'Driscoll I don't particularly think that way.
I (inexactly) remember his description of Beatles and Dylan as 'like music from the fairground', pleasant but trivial.
Reading a lot of Heaney at particular times, I did realise how relatively uninterested he was (at least as an artist) in modern things - though they crop up occasionally in the poems: airfields, aeroplanes, telephones, the Underground (train) in the poem of (I think) that name, even fibre-optic wires in the late 'Tollund Man in Springtime'. But these things stand out as noticeable because the background of earth, grass, etc, not to mention the obsession with Classical myth, is so much more pervasive.
― the pinefox, Monday, 17 April 2023 11:08 (eleven months ago) link
Well yeah, he did grow up on a farm in the middle of the countryside. He (like me) grew up in a part of the country where the bog and its strange past-present atmosphere pervades and his writing always feels very present in these poems. You should also consider that he grew up Catholic in (Co.) Derry, which was subject to neglect in terms of investment in infrastructure from Belfast due to sectarian reasons - cf the second university campus being located at Coleraine rather than in Derry - and actually the rail service was part of this. Like, they closed a rail line that served the west side of NI in the 60s -predominantly Catholic - and that remains the case to this day!
― Everybody's gonna get what they got coming (gyac), Monday, 17 April 2023 11:32 (eleven months ago) link
There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,You in your going-away coat speeding aheadAnd me, me then like a fleet god gainingUpon you before you turned to a reed
Or some new white flower japped with crimsonAs the coat flapped wide and button after buttonSprang off and fell in a trailBetween the Underground and the Albert Hall.
Honeymooning, moonlighting, late from the Proms,Our echoes die in that corridor and nowI come as Hansel came on the moonlit stonesRetracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit stationAfter the trains have gone, the wet trackBared and tensed as I am, all attentionFor your step following and damned if I look back.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 17 April 2023 11:46 (eleven months ago) link
Immanuel Velikovsky Earth In CollisionBook from 1955 tracing the geological history of the planet commenting on various finds from the time. Think its been debunked since and not sure up to here what the author's own input is. Think I came across it being talked about in The Morning of the Magicians or something way way back. I got it on an interlibrary loan a few weeks ago and think it was from a storage space so surprised to see it's got a further request on it so having to read though it rapidly. He's been somebody I wanted to read for a few decades so thought I'd at least get some of it read. Got through first few chapters anyway.So yeah he's talking about finds in geological history as applied to how long the planet has been around. He's talking about exotic animal fossils being found in th Northern hemisphere and what that has been seen to mean. Including hippopotami holidaying from Africa in Northern France and the UK or at least the geographical area.THink I thought it was going to be weirder. Well may develop further once he gets through the understood history.
David Olusoga The Kaiser's Holocaust.where the war between the local Herero tribe and the German colonial army has just reached a really negative point cos a military leader from a different tribe from the Nama has been killed. This is showing how deeply racist the German authorities were, Kaiser giving direct permission to wipe out the local tribe. Not sure if that is a great deal more so than other colonial powers of the time. They've just set up some of the first concentration camps to make Herero work and see feeding them to be a secondary concern. Revolting. took a break to read this fromI really enjoyed Olusoga's The World's War about native men being brought into the army to fight pro European powers which also showed a massive amount of racism. But seems to be part of teh epistemology of the time disgustingly.
― Stevo, Monday, 17 April 2023 12:13 (eleven months ago) link
took a break to read this fromgot displaced from in front of the David Olusoga title. Computer acting odd.
― Stevo, Monday, 17 April 2023 13:20 (eleven months ago) link
I left Wellek & Warren here:
At the start of their section on INTRINSIC STUDY, W&W start on some really wacky ideas. They say: 'We need to work out what a poem actually is. Where is it?', and they say 'You might think a poem is on paper, but actually, if you think about it, you could destroy every paper copy but if someone still remembered it in their head, the poem would still exist!'.
They quickly went on to list some other possible modes of existence for the literary work - which they have ominously shortened to 'the poem' for convenience (as if 'poem' is really a suitable shorthand for 'work of literature': the shorthand is clearly liable to introduce distortions). Thus: maybe the poem is the sound it makes when it's read out; or the reader's experience when reading it; or the writer's when writing it. They understandably say that these are inadequate. The implication is that they are working towards something like a Platonic version of the text, ie: a notional entity that can be manifested in various instances like books. You can imagine the same thing for a song. I don't know whether this approach is so helpful, but the oddity is that having pushed the argument in this direction they suddenly tend to refuse it, saying a literary text isn't actually like an ideal like 'triangle'.
So what is it? Surely some simple formula could be offered like: 'the literary work is a determinate set of words which can be manifested in an infinite number of instances including in different media'. W&W instead get bizarrely into the word 'norms' (p.150), arguing that the text is a set of norms - which is just a big deflection from the issue they've raised, especially as this word 'norms' has come almost out of nowhere and they say it's not to be confused with eg: ethical norms.
This whole chapter can be considered a philosophical rabbit-hole, a case of stopping and thinking (too?) hard about the object you were on the way to say things about, to the point where you almost dissolve the existence of said object. You could say it's philosophically valid, and interesting in itself. But then the really odd thing is: what does it have to do with literature? Is it only a literary text that raises these problems of 'modality of existence'?
Actually, not at all. Just consider eg: a speech by JFK - handwritten by JFK, typed up by an aide, delivered by JFK, published in the NYT, later included in a book called The Speeches of JFK (which goes through different editions, and gets translated), later appearing on the JFL official website. This text has just as many ambiguities of modality as a poem by Robert Frost, doesn't it? So maybe what W&W are really talking about is just the ambiguous status of any text, which may have a particular instance but, insofar as it can be copied out, seems also to have a transferrable identity that endures.
But is this even really limited to text? It's probably equally true of pictorial diagrams, for instance. In which case, W&W are very far from telling us anything specific to literature - which is generally their whole thrust and intent.
― the pinefox, Monday, 17 April 2023 17:25 (eleven months ago) link
W&W go on to a relatively long chapter on 'Euphony, Rhythm, and Metre'. This is the driest so far by far. As often, their main approach seems to be to tell us about various other theories or descriptions that have been advanced, then sigh and rather dismiss them as inadequate. The learning involved is huge - greater than most critics ever obtain - but it is not being put to especially productive use. If this is a THEORY OF LITERATURE then what is the theoretical yield, the positive outlook, from this survey? Not very clear. They do seem quite keen on the Russian Formalists, which makes me wonder whether in Cold War times the Formalists were a) dangerously foreign or b) sympathetic and feted as anti-Stalinists.
― the pinefox, Monday, 17 April 2023 17:30 (eleven months ago) link
The Making Of The English Working Class, E.P. Thompson - Finally finished this. Started due to thinking about how little of the left canon I've read, and since I live in England this seemed like a good place to start correcting that. Also the fact that it's history and not theory made it less intimidating.
Having finished it I feel like the title is misleading? The material conditions that lead to the creation of a modern proletariat are pretty much taken for granted, and what's focused on instead is a history of radical resistance, taking in the radical press, popular uprisings, trade unions. It feels more about the making of a class consciousness than of a class, though perhaps the argument is that the latter can only exist if the former does as well?
Some vague readings have suggested the book is taking a stand against economical determinism and, under the influence of Gramsci, showing how social history also molds class. I've probably butchered this argument, sorry. Anyway I can grasp Gramsci's hegemony easily enough but don't really understand how a history of radical resistance fits into this.
It was often tough going but I'm glad I preserved - I think my favourite part was about the underground jacobin resistance at the height of legislative repression. Thompson explains how the state's reliance on spies meant we got mostly overblown and fanciful accounts of this period, as obv spies had a personal interest in making things seem alarming, but also how this was overcorrected against by historians who ended up suggesting that this underground was entirely fictional. Feels like you could make a cracking BBC drama about it, with lots of room to let imagination run free as the historical sources are so scant and compromised.
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 18 April 2023 11:16 (eleven months ago) link
I reach W&W's chapter 'Image, Symbol, Metaphor, Myth'. I think I understand the grouping, but the emphasis on 'myth' is not to my taste. The idea that people need myths to live is, I find, overrated, and the idea that myth is or must be central to literature does seem accurate. I think this is a historically dated, period attitude.
When they get to metonymy and synecdoche (p.194), I become confused. It's not that I don't understand the standard examples of these phenomena which are always given. But I don't seem to understand W&W's distinction between the two things. I also wonder if metonymy has basically been overstated within literary criticism for a long time. David Lodge's promotion of it as the key to realist writing has never really made sense to me. W&W give a couple of confusing examples. They think that 'the village green' is metonymy. If so then 'the city centre' is also metonymy. Unsure how helpful that is. Strange that this particular term always ends up puzzling me.
I suppose that the book has gradually become more dense and technical.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 09:09 (eleven months ago) link
Should read: "the idea that myth is or must be central to literature does NOT seem accurate."
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 09:10 (eleven months ago) link
thompson directly addresses the issue issue of how he's defining class in the preface (his first sentence notes that the book's title is perhaps clumsy, but… ). the once-much-quoted sentence is this one: "… class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of the interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs"
(full preface here, rich in typos)
so yes, he is arguing (as i think woukld any english marxist in the early 60s) that class is a highly dynamic term rather than a passive or merely descriptive sociological banding, closer to a verb than an adjective, almost. class is a thing that happens, he says -- but what he also means is that people make it happen. and it absolutely entails consciousness of identity and purpose-in-identity.
the book (and certainly this ever so slightly tentative preface) was part of a (very 50s) project, i think, of translation alongside the historical archeology: taking concept from marxist thought that had perhaps become jargon (he was subsequently very hostile to the "theory turn") to present them to the many new readers that the post-war expansion of HE and FE was going to deliver. this was activism much more as it was in any sense academic
the gramsci issue is interesting: my understanding is that gramsci didn't really enter the uk left bloodstream until the end of the 60s (via tom nairn and perry anderson's version of the new left review rather than thompson's earlier version), at least as a body of work to reckon with (nairn spoke italian and indeed taught in italy, which is where he encountered it and brought it back). but there's an argument that the anderson-nairn version of gramsci is somewhat contorted towards the study of the effects of established instititions in reproducing the ruling ideology, where (and this is generally a more recent reading, i guess) gramsci's line and his activism were actually much more about "hegemonic struggle" (verb again) than "hegemony" (passive noun you can point to).
in particular -- writing just after WW1 -- he described "hegemonic struggle" as being like trench warfare: which i take to mean that (instead of hoping to seize the commanding heights of academia and shape things from there) the true communist is establishing perspective fighting school-by-school, library-by-library, even (since this is italy) church-by-church… in which case a history of radical resistance is precisely a history of (the emergence of a counter-)hegemony
except as i say, i think thompson wasn't yet responding to this framework with this book, bcz nairn wasn't back from italy yet (subs check this) and perry had only very recently effected his NLR boardroom coup
― mark s, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 11:22 (eleven months ago) link
Naturally I approve that everything comes back to Perry.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 11:42 (eleven months ago) link
Finished some Prynne for reading group as well as a small poetry book in translation from the Spanish that was ultimately disappointing in English— reading the original, while not mindblowing, was certainly more beautiful than the translation. I was surprised at this, given the translator’s other work. (Book in question is Adjacent Islands/Islas adyacentes, by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, trans Urayoán Noel). I also started a new book as my bedtime reading: The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is quite riveting so far, tbh, as I love Hopkins’ poetry and witnessing his poetic sensibilities and sense of language develop is thrilling and also, as one might expect, very strange! He is a strange writer! This edition is long out of print but I found a cheap copy online, highly recommended to those who are interested in GMH’s work.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Wednesday, 19 April 2023 12:07 (eleven months ago) link
nice, I was fishing for a mark s post
did I read the preface? I must have.
so yes, he is arguing (as i think woukld any english marxist in the early 60s) that class is a highly dynamic term rather than a passive or merely descriptive sociological banding, closer to a verb than an adjective, almost.
This is how a lot of academics approach the word queer now!
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 12:24 (eleven months ago) link
Love Hopkins. His prose (his diaries and the Sermons) is so good!
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 12:41 (eleven months ago) link
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Wednesday, 19 April 2023 13:20 (eleven months ago) link
I have taht Making of the English Working Class somewhere near my bed I think. Looked like something I would be very interested in having a grounding in. But I think it got backburnered by a pile of things I was picking up at the time. Still sounds like something I want to get to.Think I wound up with a load of history of the idea of race getting read instead if I'm thinking about timing right. Thinkk I needed that and other decolonisation as much though this would presumably just add another facet to that.
― Stevo, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 13:43 (eleven months ago) link
xpost hegemony as struggle makes me think of an interview I heard this morning with Julia Lee, author of the new Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America. She talks about Asians being invisible, inscrutable, vague, at best, when not responded to with outright hostility or violence---but also "weaponizing invisibility"---she relates this to Ralph Ellison---in a possibly positive way:
Asian Americans might reside in a position of existential invisibility and yet that also makes us incredibly powerful and subversive, because nobody is looking at us, and we are looking at everything.
― dow, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 17:09 (eleven months ago) link
I love reading poets' prose.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 April 2023 17:12 (eleven months ago) link
Just finished “And Then There Were None”, which I’ve seen multiple adaptations of, but never read. It’s the best Christie I’ve read, alongside “Cards on the Table”. The writing is unusual and original by Christie standards – all breathless short paragraphs, like James Ellroy but less annoying. The result is extremely paranoid and tense, even if you know the ending.
Now onto “Mixed Up Files of Basil Frankweiler”, based on some previous ILB recommendations…
― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, 19 April 2023 21:11 (eleven months ago) link
Wellek & Warren on poetics was pretty abstruse to me. More fresh air arrives in Chapter 16, on 'Narrative Fiction'. These are the kind of critics who think that even talking about that new-fangled form the Novel is a bit dicey. Indeed they start by saying that the novel has not amassed the critical tradition that poetry has. They immediately get in to some quite agreeable statements, eg on p.213:
Realism and naturalism, whether in the drama or the novel, are literary or literary-philosophical movements, conventions, styles, like romanticism or surrealism. The distinction is not between reality and illusion, but between differing conceptions of reality, between differing modes of illusion.
Actually that one's such a chestnut, even a canard, that I think it would be worth revisiting and querying. But it gets better a page later when they talk of the novelist's 'world' as a key concept. This is so broad that no-one in academic writing ever talks about it, yet I agree with them that it's a useful way to talk.
The great novelists all have such a world - recognizable as overlapping the empirical world but different in its self-coherent intelligibility.
The 'overlap' there is interesting. Does fiction really overlap with the real world? I think rather it makes a double of it, which it then varies.
They quote Desmond McCarthy who is brisker than they are, who explains well how a novelist's characters belong in that novelist's world, so it is strange to imagine one novelist's character in another's world: 'If Pecksniff were transplanted into The Golden Bowl he would become extinct' (p.214). Here is, in a way, the (pre-PoMo) basis of a whole aspect of PoMo fiction. You can imagine a PoMo narrative literally about a character from one novel who risks becoming extinct in another - indeed such texts probably exist. It's the sort of thing Coover would do; in a way, it had already been adumbrated in AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, ten years before W&W's book.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 20 April 2023 08:48 (eleven months ago) link
Immanuel Velikovsky Earth iN UpheavalThis does get weirder as we go into his own theories rather than interpretation of historic geologists ideas, or maybe more noticeably when I'm not speed reading as much. He didn't like the existing thought of things developing gradually over millions of years, preferring the idea of several cataclysmic events. Talks a lot about deposits of bones in unlikely places consequentially meaning things prescribed by him. & I need to have another look at where the idea of the holidaying hippopotami swimming up from North Africa to Northern Europe came from, if it was his own or not.But the later part of teh book looks into things like teh disappearance of Atlantis, several; versions of Troy etc in a way that is a bit adrift. This book apparently did get a lot of following between its 1955 release and a couple of decades later. I see there are a number of books looking into its popularity and it as pseudoscience. I think I may have come across it in Morning of the Magicians when I read that in my teens or Colin Wilson's work or something along those lines. NOt sure what but have wanted to read it or at least one of his for decades. NOw wound up having to read it faster than I'd expected because there is a request out on it and it's now a couple of days overdue. Finding it weird that I got it from a storage place and somebody is after it directly after me when it would appear it was otherwise retired. Oh well, occult esoterica and the like.It does seem to argue coherently which may be why it was popular. Think I may have been expecting something a lot more sensationalist or something. Does Von Daniken seem apparently rational in a similar way? I mean despite the racism and whether or not you believe in alien life and all.Read the last 100 pages last night when I couldn't sleep
David Olusoga & Casper Erichsen The Kaiser's HolocaustThe history of the German colony in South West Africa leading to war and then genocide of the Nama peoples. I enjoy Olusoga so want to read more. THis was pretty good. I've just read the main par of the book which is about that era of colonisation. About to start the section on the links with the rise of teh National Socialist Party over the decade after the First World War. There were direct links in as much as Herman Goering's dad was the first Governor of the colony. But some of the other people setting up the party were also involved.
― Stevo, Thursday, 20 April 2023 09:59 (eleven months ago) link
'If Pecksniff were transplanted into The Golden Bowl he would become extinct' (p.214). Here is, in a way, the (pre-PoMo) basis of a whole aspect of PoMo fiction.
Also on a more populist level, the basis of franchise crossover films like Alien Vs. Predator or Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.
― o. nate, Thursday, 20 April 2023 16:52 (eleven months ago) link
Yes. Good point - though in those instances the crossover doesn't seem to create much ontological disruption? The characters seem to exist OK in the same plane?
― the pinefox, Friday, 21 April 2023 09:37 (eleven months ago) link
W&W's chapter on narrative fiction continues in a vein that makes me realise: this book is something like an *encyclopedia*. It doesn't so much make a developing argument as amass 'things we know so far about literature'.
Thus sentences like:
The simplest form of characterization is naming. (219)Modes of characterisation are many. (219)A story can be told through letters and journals. Or it can develop from anecdotes. (221)Interesting is the question of how the story purports to exist. (222)
Modes of characterisation are many. (219)
A story can be told through letters and journals. Or it can develop from anecdotes. (221)
Interesting is the question of how the story purports to exist. (222)
(Imagine publishing that last sentence now!)
They undermine the legibility of their theory by introducing confusing terms from other languages: thus: 'What we call the "composition"of the novel is, by the Germans and Russians, called its "motivation"' (217) - and then they take off with this new word. Wait, what do we mean by 'composition' in the first place? Why not establish that before replacing the word with another one which is counter-intuitive? In cases like this, the rationality, certainly the clarity, of W&W goes astray.
A deeper issue, I find, is their attachment to an idea of The Novel that belongs to an earlier time - not in that it's 'realist', quite contrary, in that it involves simplification and caricature. They seem intuitively to think that a novel has a 'rounded' hero surrounded by a lot of 'flat' characters who are 'types' - perhaps servants, clowns, etc. My sense is that this model would work OK for the 18th century; it works less well for Virginia Woolf, or for lots of other novels that you could imagine writing or reading.
The model leads them to say:
There are character-typologies, partly literary tradition, partly folk-anthropology, which are used by novelists. In nineteenth-century English and American fictin, one finds brunettes [...] and blondes [...] The blonde is the home-maker, unexciting but steady and sweet. The brunette - passionate, violent, mysterious, alluring, and untrustworthy - gathers up the characteristics of the Oriental, the Jewish, the Spanish, and the Italian as seen from the point of view of the 'Anglo-Saxon' (219-20).
It is truly hard to know where to begin with this. Well:
1: It looks like simple racism. It's extraordinary that at this point in history they can write so casually of these 'racial types' in this, at best, uncritical way. You could say that they are framing it as a convention, the 'Anglo-Saxon' also a type. But they don't seem to stand far enough back from the frame. How about, at least, considering whether Italian or Spanish literature also 'others' 'Anglo-Saxons' in a parallel way (or if not, why not?), rather than staying with the idea that the white Anglo is the norm? It's a mess.
2: It's also counter-intuitive from the POV even of norms / stereotypes that had developed by the time they were writing (not long before Marilyn Monroe takes off) - when 'Gentlemen prefer blondes', and blondes are the more attractive, brunettes more steady and homely. A reversal of the stereotype? Wouldn't that say something about the artificial nature of the stereotypes?
3: OK, maybe novelists used to write this way. But do they still, by 1949? If not, why not? Why isn't this recourse to stereotype historicised and treated as limited?
4: Apart from the ethical objections you might have to such stereotypes, aren't they also aesthetically limiting?
My general point is: I am baffled re: why W&W are stuck with a view of prose fiction that relies on caricature and simplification. They're in the mid-20th century, they ought to be able to see that prose fiction can do other things.
― the pinefox, Friday, 21 April 2023 10:02 (eleven months ago) link
Depends. Sometimes there's metatextual jokes to highlight the inconsistencies; more self-seriously, often you get the explanation of a multiverse to justify their crossover.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 21 April 2023 10:03 (eleven months ago) link
What's a good example of that, good to read?
― dow, Friday, 21 April 2023 16:49 (eleven months ago) link
I guess this kind of crossover fiction is more legally feasible in the comic book world where most of the intellectual property is owned by a few mega-corporations. Copyright law would make it difficult to do for most recent fiction. I guess this why these mash-ups tend to be done for stuff in the public domain, like Jane Austen. Or else they circulate as unauthorized fan-fiction.
― o. nate, Friday, 21 April 2023 19:26 (eleven months ago) link
Got the Heaney book, all. Thanks.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 21 April 2023 19:38 (eleven months ago) link
I've been inching through Books of Jacob by Olga Tocarczuk. At 1/3 through I'm thinking about abandoning it, it's just too long to keep at something that's... not bad just boring but, y'know, sunk cost fallacy.
Has anyone here finished it and have compelling reasons to keep going (or not)?
― ed.b, Friday, 21 April 2023 20:17 (eleven months ago) link
I talked about it on the olga tocarczuk thread, I think it does build into something remarkable but if you're a full third in and bored I'm not sure that would change.
― ledge, Saturday, 22 April 2023 08:18 (eleven months ago) link
currently reading 'the road to en-dor', an autobiographical account of a real life escape from a first world war turkish prison camp, achieved by tricking the captors with ouija boards and conjuring and mentalism. a proper boys own adventure tale, though the action is psychological not physical, and there's the expected casual racism - "johnny turk is a queer mixture of brutality and chivalry" being the worst example so far, morally and aesthetically. I wonder if 'the confidence men' by margalit fox, a more recent telling of the story, would be a better read.
― ledge, Saturday, 22 April 2023 08:25 (eleven months ago) link
prisoner of war camp, that is.
― ledge, Saturday, 22 April 2023 08:38 (eleven months ago) link
Joanna Russ How To Suppress Women's Writingsomewhat satirical overview of the various ways in which the patriarchal establishment undermines female authors. Writer was a sci fi author whose The Female Man which I picked up from a charity shop a while back and have yet to get to. Think I'd only realised this was the same author a couple of days back. Not sure exactly where I saw this recommended but does seem interesting so far. I think I got it from a storage area in the library system, though it seems like something that should be better known or is that just in the Irish library system? Since the Velikovsky I read last week came from a storage space, The Galway Warehouse, and was requested before I wanted to renew it, would be good if the same thing happened here. Oh well seems quite good so far.
picked up a couple of other library requests this week which I have yet to startOn savage shores : how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe Caroline Dodds Pennock book about the cultural interchange the other way than is normally reported. Since the first European contact with the Americas there had been some Native American (or whatever term is better used) presence in Europe. Columbus brought people from the Americas back with him including a number of free nobility etc who interacted with European society. I've yet to read this so not fully onboard on what this meant, I did listen to a podcast on the book. Possibly Gone Medieval, though I think the author did do several guest slot appearances.Sounded really good from that so looking forward to reading it . But am sticking myself with a large pile of books to read immediately.
also An immense world : how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us Ed Yongbook on the expanded world that animal senses percieve compared to human. Recently published which may be why I was seeing it turning up as a recommendation. looks good and the couple of podcasts I caught on it made it seem interesting. So again looking forwrd to reading it . Got a bit more time right now i think but am picking up more books tahn I can read all of right now. Hope I get to them all. But if i pick up an infinite amount of books and only have a finite amount o ftime to read them all may need to prioritise better. This i will hopefully get through over next few weeks.
picked up copies of a few of the Time Life published World Of Art series on individual artists too which look good. Got Durer, Breugel and Leonardo da Vincihoping there may still be a couple of these left where I got these from.
Also got Angela Saini's new book The Patriarchs arrived yesterday so looking forward to reading that. Do like her writing.
& there's a new edition of Ugly Things out right now. Need to catch up with bits of the last 2 too.
― Stevo, Saturday, 22 April 2023 10:05 (eleven months ago) link
I finish THEORY OF LITERATURE. Summary comments:
* The book is written in a manner that would be unimaginable now. On the whole this for me adds to its charm and interest. Older ways of writing, I find, can be stimulating and can raise the question: why can't we write like this?
* The book is impressively inclusive in the areas of literature, conceptually, that it discusses. It is also immensely learned, notably over multiple languages (something else less common now among Anglosphere authors).
* However, a possible weakness about the book is the way it turns out to be rather a compendium of ideas and pieces of knowledge, assorted together, rather than a developing 'theory'. It often seems as though W&W are basically saying: 'Literary genre? OK, here are all the things we currently know about literary genre'.
* The work belongs to the era of New Criticism and it partakes in the effort to purify the attention to literature, to abstract it from history, biography and so on. As a heuristic device I don't mind this. In W&W it is at least bracing to see someone working out eg: 'What is a literary period, if it isn't determined by the political events of said period?'
* The book was once well known and widely seen, but what was its influenced? Probably greater in the US than the UK. Terry Eagleton in THE EVENT OF LITERATURE (2012) calls it immensely influential but I have seen virtually no evidence of that. I'm not sure I have ever met anyone who has really read it.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 22 April 2023 10:27 (eleven months ago) link
I did a pretty 'crit-heavy' English degree and Masters in the early 2000s ('mature' student, doncha know) and W&W were a foundational part of the early critical theory module. They were presented as dated then, or perhaps they were historicised, and that particular kind of criticism parked, as it were, in its time and place.
I don't feel in any way engaged with this field, but I suppose the W&W names have become a kind of invisible metonymy for a notionally clean and objective criticism that concentrates solely on the text (if such a thing were possible). An available style or approach, stored away in some dusty attic of the working critic's mind.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Saturday, 22 April 2023 11:00 (eleven months ago) link
I'm back at work and reading desultorily when I can: continuing with the Heaney interviews (he's in Berkeley about to move to Wicklow); dipping into Edumund White's *The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris*, which is diverting but parts of it - particularly the way he writes about race - put my teeth on edge; and David Macey's *The Lives of Michel Foucault*, which I dug out to add to the 'to read' pile but got caught up in the introduction. I once attended a talk about Foucalt by David Macey, and ended up in the pub with him afterwards. He smoked a *spectacular* amount and it's fair to say I have never in my life seen a man so ravaged by the effects of cigarette smoking.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Saturday, 22 April 2023 11:07 (eleven months ago) link
I have Edmund White's My Lives beside me on a pile of books to be read.Looked at it recently and wasn't sure what had directed me to pick it up but could be it being by the same guy who wrote The Flaneur which I'd also meant to read./ I did attend a talk by a couple of local artists on the act of Flaneurism as tied in with their practise a couple of years ago that ma have directed me to it that and possibly psychogeography. Think I'd read a review of the White book too.
― Stevo, Saturday, 22 April 2023 11:21 (eleven months ago) link
I seem to recall that one of the earliest chapters in Macey's biography is called 'Waiting for Godot', though (as I also seem to recall) it contains disappointingly little about the play or MF's experience of it.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 22 April 2023 11:45 (eleven months ago) link
Ovid - The Metamorphisis* (tr. Golding)Home - The Odysssey (tr. Chapman)
Been delving into old translations of epics. I didn't finish Golding's Metamorphisis as I've lost the book in the pub, but up till then the going could be described as good. With these things you re-wire your brain to old forms of English, as if you are thrust into a double act of having to acquire fluency twice over. Of course it isn't possible to judge what has been lost, but I focus on what has been gained in certain passages where certain things are written about which have been done so many times before by different poets in the past and present. Nature, animals, the sea, loss, love (a son's for his father, a wife's for her husband), violence, killing, and so on.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 22 April 2023 13:10 (eleven months ago) link
*Homer, you know what I mean
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 22 April 2023 13:16 (eleven months ago) link
I almost checked out the Lattimore translation of The Iliad last month.
I liked The Flaneur at the time and I almost always find something worthwhile in Edmund White's stuff, but, yes, his self-absorption is an annoyance and sometimes a menace.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 22 April 2023 13:17 (eleven months ago) link
Reading Jason Morris’ Levon Helm, a book of poems that includes the long titular poem named after the Band drummer. Morris is an interesting poet to me because he writes in a casual, talky way that I often find cloying or cute, but he’s able to make it work— I find myself gravitating toward his poems a few times per year.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Saturday, 22 April 2023 13:23 (eleven months ago) link
Here’s something Levon’s troubled stepson wrote about him:https://richardsmanuel.tumblr.com/post/121183926169
― The Lubitsch Touchscreen (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 22 April 2023 13:29 (eleven months ago) link
I really enjoyed Brandy Jensen’s piece on Jack Reacher for Defector but I am struggling with my first actual Reacher book, TRIPWIRE. The prose is almost Lanchester-level drab and particular. Child will spend two paragraphs describing a door that has no actual bearing on the action, without ever making the door come to life. And the dialogue is so perfunctorily hard-boiled, the whole thing reads like a fiction class writing exercise.
― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 22 April 2023 18:12 (eleven months ago) link
That's a great piece. I've read four Reacher novels. My capsule review would be 'emptily readable bollocks'.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Saturday, 22 April 2023 18:30 (eleven months ago) link
The emptiness, and the random quotidian detail, makes suspension of disbelief hard for me. More than most things I’ve read, I find it hard to imagine the story is Actually Happening. I just picture an English bloke typing in any office, misremembering an old Mission Impossible episode, thinking “what’s a good sentence about a chair?”
― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 22 April 2023 18:54 (eleven months ago) link
love the reacher books tbh. think I read like 15 in one year and I still never tired of descriptions of reacher elbowing some shithead in the face.
― oscar bravo, Saturday, 22 April 2023 19:14 (eleven months ago) link
Have read none of those books; enjoyed that piece.
― The Lubitsch Touchscreen (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 22 April 2023 19:20 (eleven months ago) link
I haven’t got as far as any violence yet. Maybe that’s what I’m missing.
― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 22 April 2023 19:22 (eleven months ago) link
Yeah, I think wait until you see Reacher in action, then I'll think you'll know if these are for you. I've read *Tripwire*; there are some good Reacher arse-kicking scenes, as I recall.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Saturday, 22 April 2023 19:29 (eleven months ago) link
It's fun that when are Jack Reacher novels are discussed, the ultimate measure of how bad their prose could be is ... John Lanchester.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 22 April 2023 19:42 (eleven months ago) link
Murphy, Miles to GoWolfram, What Is ChatGPT DoingSooke, Roy LichtensteinRansmayr, The Last World. This last one was an utter waste of time.
― alimosina, Saturday, 22 April 2023 21:30 (eleven months ago) link
I finished "Portrait of Dorian Gray". The book seems to have strange pacing. It starts out with a typical amount of action concentrated into a few weeks, reaches a sort of climax, and then starts skipping ahead, striding over ever increasing spans of time, until we have a chapter that dispenses with entire decades (although I oddly enjoyed that chapter, a cursory summary of all the interests that occupied Gray over a span of 15 or so years, it reads more like an essay and it reminded me a bit of "Bouvard and Pecuchet" as an inventory of trendy ideas of the period), before finally slowing down and becoming more novelistic again to accomodate some final plot business.
Continuing my fin de siecle theme, I am now reading Volume 2 of William James's Principles of Psychology.
― o. nate, Sunday, 23 April 2023 02:29 (eleven months ago) link
The James bros were so different.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 23 April 2023 02:39 (eleven months ago) link
Good description, o.nate. FWIW I only read DORIAN GRAY last September or so and my response will be on that ILB thread. I seem to recall that one of the things that slightly surprised me was how heterosexual Dorian Gray (at least sometimes) was.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 23 April 2023 09:36 (eleven months ago) link
Having diverted from it to read some other marvellous books, I remembered that I need to keep on with Bono's SURRENDER. It's still readable, entertaining, stimulating, not even slow to read. Yet I'm still not halfway through. It's long.
The mid-1980s are probably the most interesting time I could read about. There's a page on what a good period it was when they were recording THE JOSHUA TREE, in Malahide I believe. Another couple of good pages on the melancholy 'promenades' around Bray and Greystones (surprisingly far out from the city, if Bono was actually living there - in a Martello Tower! - which he connects slightly to Yeats but not at all to Joyce).
From the LPs in 1984 to 1987 was 2.5 years (with a mini-LP in 1985 if you like). At that time this was a relatively long gap. What happened? Maybe they were just touring, maybe it took time make the LP. But also ... Bono (with wife Ali) was living in Ethiopia for a while in 1985, then Central America for a while in 1986. Maybe not long periods but they would have taken organisation at both ends. I wonder, therefore, if one reason for the slightly long delay between LPs was, *already*, Bono's extra-curricular activities.
He can skip over some things rather quickly - the JOSHUA TREE tour, for instance. The Dublin sessions for RATTLE & HUM are hardly mentioned at all, though they're vivid in the film (and interviews take place there). Now we're almost on to ACHTUNG BABY. But not halfway through the book. Logically that suggests that half the book will be concerned with things like ... Bono's debt campaigning, his controversial meetings with world leaders (which he's already discussed), and the less popular later records?
Bono is intellectually lively, if not deep. I'm happy to see him engage with various ideas and people (Mikhail Gorbachev for instance). But I do worry more when he says 'Douglas Alexander has been advising me for the last 5 years'.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 23 April 2023 09:39 (eleven months ago) link
may seem odd me jumping in here to defend terry eagleton (!) abt what constitutes influence (!!) but couldn't he simply mean that (a) W&W were the first to turn up and say "we all need a THEORY of literature and here it is", and (b) who was being "influenced" is everyone who then said "well yes we DO need one… just not THAT one"
anyway here's the one *i* favour:
novels are so great. novels are like "i made up a little weirdo. oh no, now he's in trouble!"— Gabrielle Moss (@Gaby_Moss) April 22, 2023
― mark s, Sunday, 23 April 2023 09:58 (eleven months ago) link
I hope for a long Mark S article in praise of Terry.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 23 April 2023 12:17 (eleven months ago) link
weird question, but figure it’s the right place to ask: anyone have a favorite book on the the great fire of London?
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Sunday, 23 April 2023 12:43 (eleven months ago) link
mine is pepys's diary but i suspect that's not what you have in mind
(important detail: he buried his big parmesan cheese in the garden to save it from the flames)
― mark s, Sunday, 23 April 2023 12:58 (eleven months ago) link
I mean I would too
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 23 April 2023 13:02 (eleven months ago) link
I like the idea of Pepys’ diary (and also the experimental novel by Roubaud), but yes, looking more for straight history, perhaps from a left leaning perspective
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Sunday, 23 April 2023 13:07 (eleven months ago) link
Overstory - PowersReally into it! Makes me want to re read all the nature writing I read in college
― calstars, Sunday, 23 April 2023 16:45 (eleven months ago) link
Magda Szabó - The FawnA collection of Weldon Kees poems.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 23 April 2023 16:51 (eleven months ago) link
I still never tired of descriptions of reacher elbowing some shithead in the face.
Writing action like that is hard. You have to be vivid enough to pull the reader's imagination entirely into the scene and terse enough that the pace feels breathtakingly quick.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 23 April 2023 18:18 (eleven months ago) link
Will have to check that--also, I keep coming across killer quotes from Thoreau (latest round started in Kim Stanley Robinson's meganovel Greem Earth, whose author is at his own best involved with East and esp. West Coast Great Outdoors). Turns out my local library has even more HDT than KSR, oh boy---and I'll ask them to borrow or buy Robinson's awesome-looking nonfictionThe High Sierra: A love story. (He is someone who reportedly combined acid with mountain-climbing early on, much more successfully than young Hank Williams JR.)
― dow, Sunday, 23 April 2023 20:47 (eleven months ago) link
The history of the blues Francis Davis, Seems to be a pretty decent read, I'm enjoying the writing. He's gone back to look at pre Blues Minstrelsy and what W.C. Handy heard in a waiting room in 1903 and links to musical theatre. He's also looked at Ali Farka Toure and sees his music as having influence from John lee Hooker and is dubious about the influence being clearly the other way. Like Toure being an existing fan of Hooker before he started citing Hooker as obviously descending from teh West African styles. Think that may be overly cynical but maybe that fandom should be noted, does seem to be a problem with direction of fit.I think that African influence is there anyway.But anyway, seems to be a decent book , interesting read quite anecdotal andsustaining my interest. I have had this out of the library too long without really looking at it. So need to get through it now.
Not A Nation of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortizher book on settler colonialism . I read her talking about people of Spanish descent including a gentrifying level where people descending from Pueblo Indians were now drifting into claiming themselves to be Spanish recently despite years of Spanish on Pueblo oppression.I'm now in a section on Irish settlement which reminds me I still need to read Theodore Allen's book The Invention of The White Race which I think I got slowed down on because of the plethora of endnotes. Anyway a book that i do still really want to read which talks about the British settling Scots in Ireland and use of the country as a colony which became a prototype for what they did to set up empire. The Dunbar Ortiz is really good and I've wanted to read it since it was released a couple of years ago.
― Stevo, Monday, 24 April 2023 09:22 (eleven months ago) link
I finished two stories in the Penguin book of French stories:
Claire Sainte-Soline, 'Le tabac vert', about a farmer, his wife, and his father. Much tension down on the tobacco farm. The tense (in a different sense) and much of the vocabulary were hard for me and I must often consult the parallel English text. One word to stay with me from this story is 'feuilles', leaves, which must also be the source of 'fueilleton' (a kind of newspaper as I recall).
Roger Grenier, 'Une maison place des fetes': the writing here feels much simpler, and is also discernibly slangy / colloquial at times. I was able to follow it without the English version much more often. The story describes a lad, a trainee lawyer, and his dalliance with two women. It's very much like an Éric Rohmer plot. It's surprisingly racy - the protagonists are always saucily making passes at each other - in a way somewhat in keeping with the colloquial tone. It ends with a summary paragraph about the passing of time. 'Chacun de nous a ses petits pelerinages, ses tombeaux.' I really quite enjoyed this.
― the pinefox, Monday, 24 April 2023 13:01 (eleven months ago) link
― mark s, Sunday, 23 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink
Saving this advice for when London burns again (climate change edition)
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 24 April 2023 13:06 (eleven months ago) link
A friend of mine sent me a photo of an enormous book in his collection that consists of 400 pages of poems on the fire and rebuilding of London written at the time. Hard to find, apparently, as few copies were printed, but I am going to try to locate a copy.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Monday, 24 April 2023 13:47 (eleven months ago) link
I return to John le Carré's SILVERVIEW - I was halfway through. Quick to read, it grows on me.
― the pinefox, Monday, 24 April 2023 19:18 (eleven months ago) link
It's solid.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 24 April 2023 19:29 (eleven months ago) link
it's good
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, 24 April 2023 19:47 (eleven months ago) link
Rereading Junichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 25 April 2023 09:10 (eleven months ago) link
I interrupted my reading about the French Revolution long enough to read a short palate-cleanser, Aiding and Abetting, Muriel Spark. It was quite clever, but it ended on a very silly note that felt like she just gave up on finding a better ending and tacked one on blindfolded, like pinning a tail on the donkey.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, 25 April 2023 18:24 (eleven months ago) link
I'm about 2/3 of the way through Birnam Wood. It's taken some unexpected turns; it started out kind of "cozy," but has got much darker. I'm still not 100% sold on the character of the sociopathic billionaire, but she's a very capable writer, whose sentences just sort of carry you along. I imagine her reading in the voice of Sophie Townsend, the woman who did the "Goodbye to All" podcast.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 25 April 2023 18:33 (eleven months ago) link
Started reading Augusto Boal Legislative Theatre which arrived yesterday. It's an experimental book based on his time in government. He had the idea that the reader should read it in the order they chjose depending on what they wanted to get out of it. In the introduction he mentions a few points taht some people might be interested in so I looked at a couple of those. His interactions with Paulo Freire whose educational work he tried to apply to theatre.I think I may wind up reading it more linearly which goes against his recommendation..I'm trying to get more of his message after the local Theatre for Change really disappointed me with their lack of recognition of agency and a few other hypocrisies. Other things that I've read including Freire and a few writers like Angela Saini's comments on race etc have made me view that group very cynically. It seems like Boal's work would have a direct application if handled right and not turned into a self congratulatory management training course. THe book is mainly about how Boal wound up applying the techniques he developed for the theatre onto the woirk of government once he wound up in an elected position. Back at a time when Brazil had become progressive and not regressed into Bolsanaroism. Boal talks about coming up with the Theatre fo teh Oppressed stuff intially at a time when the system was pretty repressive so things seem to be going around in cycles.Anyway looking forward to reading this but do have a number of things on teh go at teh same time. Picked this up quite cheaply as a 'Good' rated copy. It does have some pencil and highlighter underlining/highlighting but book state seems very nice otherwise.
I started teh day by reading a few chapters in Francis Davis' A History Of The Blues which has me wanting to listen to a lot of teh artists mentioned. Book is from 95 so may be missing some updates. I think it has the most recent discovery in terms of Robert Johnson photos in .Not totally sure about attitudes to race etc but is quite interesting. & Davis isn't prejudiced per se I don't think just don't think he is exactly woke either.Seems worth reading though.
also wound up moving ontoJoanna Russ How To Suppress Women's Writing after a couple of hours. She is talking about women writers who had to publish anonymously to get their work out. She mentions teh differentiation in reaction to interpretation of Emily Bronte#s Wuthering Heights between it being published and it coming out a while later that the author is female. Going from it being raw and crude to something much more genteel without anything else being changed than the background information about the author's gender. I'm quite enjoying the book and glad I got it grabbed through interlibrary loan. Would love to hear it was being read by others after me.Must read her sci fi novel the Female Man too since I have it somewhere.
― Stevo, Wednesday, 26 April 2023 18:39 (eleven months ago) link
Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky
Occasionally very funny memoir of marriage and parenting. I thought the chapter about suburbia was especially good. A lot of reviews seem to object to her personally (she should have made different choices, she is unlikeable, etc.), which seems to miss the point of memoir to me.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell
Pretty rote historical fiction. Disappointing because I thought Hamnet was great.
American Made by Farah Stockman
Superficially this is a book length version of those diner safari articles about working class midwestern trump voters. In practice I thought it was much better than that. It's mostly not a big picture economics and politics book. It's just reporting on one town/three people.
Dawn by Octavia Butler
Wow. Extremely good. Will maybe say more when I've read the rest of the series.
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris
If you like Robert Harris you will like this book.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, 26 April 2023 19:29 (eleven months ago) link
Also read two Patrick O'Brian books, as a treat
I managed to get the Lillith trilogy by Octavia Butler as an omnibus anthology thick tome in a charity shop a couple of years ago and read Dawn but neither of teh other 2 so far. Need to catch up with that and the other Butler I picked up since. Nearly got Parable of The Talents this week cos it's around cheaply.Watched the first episode fo Kindred a week or so ago. Thought it was ok, so need to watch more. & have the book beside teh bed too. Butler's good, not sure why I only discovered her recently.
― Stevo, Wednesday, 26 April 2023 19:38 (eleven months ago) link
Finished The Confidence Man by Herman Melville, starting Valis by Philip K. Dick.
― This machine bores fascism (PBKR), Wednesday, 26 April 2023 19:58 (eleven months ago) link
Finished Birnam Wood. Really let down by the ending. It felt rushed and not at all earned.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, 26 April 2023 19:59 (eleven months ago) link
xp Omnibus edition of the Octavia Butler trilogy including Dawn is called Lilith's Brood not just Lilith. Series is otherwise called Xenogenesis. I do need to read the rest of it and her other work.Thinking of black sci fi authors I quite enjoyed the Flame Tree Publishing collection Black sci-fi short stories : anthology of new & classic tales which I think I mainly picked up for the Pauline Hopkins novel of One Blood being included in full . It has a few full length novels from the end fo the 19th century/beginning of 20th which is cool. I thought the imprint was a bit of a tabloid/high st set up but that had some very interesting choices in which means I might give the rest of their output another look. I think I need to read more black sci fi overall. I have Colson Whitehead's Underground Railway around too. But always need to read a lot more than the stack I already am.
Joanna Russ in her How To Suppress Women's writing keeps riffing on a number of ideas collected together as the means by which her title is done. I have the book open in front of me thought I'd repeat it.She didn't write itShe wrote it but she shouldn't have.She wrote it but look what she wrote aboutshe wrote it , but "she" isn't really an artist and "it" isn't really serious,of the right genre -i.e. really art.She wrote it , but she wrote only one of itShe wrote it but it's only interesting/included in the canon for one limited reason.She wrote it, but there are very few of herWhich she has been meticulously working through showing examples of where each of these have been done.I'm really enjoying the book. I think it was republished relatively recently but the irish library system only has one copy which is kept in a basement in Rathmines when not directly requested. Not sure if it is thought to have been replaced by another more recent title or if everything is just inherently systematically sexist
― Stevo, Thursday, 27 April 2023 09:01 (eleven months ago) link
― more difficult than I look (Aimless),
Not 20 minutes ago I finished A Far Cry from Kensington.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 27 April 2023 10:02 (eleven months ago) link
xp I'd like to read that, I'll see if my library has a copy. the female man is top tier imo fyi.
― ledge, Thursday, 27 April 2023 10:17 (eleven months ago) link
I'm enjoying it. I see that there was a reprint in 2018 so 5 years ago. I don't really have a landmark for me to guage obscurity/popularity from and can't think offhand where I got turned onto it by. NOt seeing a note of where it was recommended in a bibliography or anything.Think I may have even heard it discussed, so maybe Backlisted or Better Read Than Dead or something.
― Stevo, Thursday, 27 April 2023 11:07 (eleven months ago) link
meanwhile, I was reading the mushroom at the end of the world but my copy had mysteriously vanished :( so I've moved on to the traveller of the century by andres neuman, following a jclc post about him on the rolling lit fic thread. first thoughts: it's long. but intriguing.
― ledge, Thursday, 27 April 2023 12:58 (eleven months ago) link
As a complete change of pace, I started Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, by David Maraniss, which my wife gave me for Christmas. I know precious little about "the greatest athlete of all time," and am very curious. The book is a doorstop, but it has been well reviewed. We shall see.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Thursday, 27 April 2023 14:11 (eleven months ago) link
J.H.Prynne - Poems. At nearly 600 pages it's a lot of poetry to go through. While many would say Prynne is opaque -- and while that is true -- there is plenty of fluency (almost O'Hara like at times), and a certain project in mapping out a very modern, inorganic world here. I don't think I've read another poet who is as committed to the inorganic matter as he is.
In the early poetry he can utter a word like "love" or "flowers". These words just don't function at all in the way they would with any other poet. It's what really got to me, at first.
In about the mid-80s things become harder to get an interpretation on, but I felt there was a lot of fluency to the language. The outputs (if you like) are strange, compelling.
I can see why there is a cult around him. For now. Maybe he is the poet we will be reading if we survive our catastrophes.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 28 April 2023 13:29 (eleven months ago) link
i am reading MEMO FOR NEMO by william firebrace, very kindly given me as a flatwarming present by my longtime ilx pal and birthday buddy TRACER HAND
it is an old-fashioned essay, amiably pondering jules verne and the nautilus, submarines, aquariums, underwater photography and undersea life and i am enjoying it greatly: it turns out that buying a flat near the sea in plymouth and gradually fashioning it to my needs (viz containing books) is in certain ways not unlike nemo's great project
currently i am reading about the fellow below, the swiss balloonist and bathscapher AUGUSTE PICCARD -- who hergé once saw in the street and immediately shoehorned into the tintin canon
https://i.imgur.com/n0lidXU.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/LsQzfOD.png
― mark s, Saturday, 29 April 2023 10:16 (eleven months ago) link
sorry that's BATHYscapher
― mark s, Saturday, 29 April 2023 10:18 (eleven months ago) link
Professor Calculus?
― the pinefox, Saturday, 29 April 2023 11:23 (eleven months ago) link
J.H.Prynne - Poems. At nearly 600 pages it's a lot of poetry to go through. While many would say Prynne is opaque -- and while that is true -- there is plenty of fluency (almost O'Hara like at times), and a certain project in mapping out a very modern, inorganic world here. I don't think I've read another poet who is as committed to the inorganic matter as he is. In the early poetry he can utter a word like "love" or "flowers". These words just don't function at all in the way they would with any other poet. It's what really got to me, at first.In about the mid-80s things become harder to get an interpretation on, but I felt there was a lot of fluency to the language. The outputs (if you like) are strange, compelling.I can see why there is a cult around him. For now. Maybe he is the poet we will be reading if we survive our catastrophes.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Saturday, 29 April 2023 13:53 (eleven months ago) link
In the meantime, the semester is over and when I am not grading, I’m catching up on the piles that have accumulated— today I’m reading Argentine poet Maria Negroni’s Exilium, an interesting book regarding myth, the years of dictatorship, exile from language, and (seemingly) cycles of birth/re-birth. Evocative and strange work, center-aligned, with a good translation.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Saturday, 29 April 2023 14:00 (eleven months ago) link
xyzzzz, I forgot to add— glad yr finding something in Prynne’s work!
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Saturday, 29 April 2023 14:01 (eleven months ago) link
Professor Calculus?― the pinefox, Saturday, 29 April 2023 12:23 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
― the pinefox, Saturday, 29 April 2023 12:23 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
the same! or tryphon tournesol as he is known in the original belgian
apparently the actual real piccard was a very tall and thin long-necked man; hergé felt this a bodyshape that did not suit his favoured cartoon dimensions, so he made calculus a "mini-piccard"
― mark s, Saturday, 29 April 2023 14:02 (eleven months ago) link
that is quite delightful
― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, 29 April 2023 14:47 (eleven months ago) link
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc3krgW-LIQARaJ4YKxZoQcdwHuerJ94ePZCXRtF5gsL13HiEVYHPEL8qU5wohJlt0cpTW3ZWzLPw3tPYAgtZNoST8rk7mM1W5QBR5XvES9TlL2dxBQpoLOkblyz9oNoMF0hAUC5_EBSEetF3fDIDfuJgpRDEuHcfyQHDK2_5HyFkw_M7WToPCvvq-/s1600/auguste-piccard-4.jpg
― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 29 April 2023 16:56 (eleven months ago) link
last month was all illegitimacy, Scarlet Letter, Ruth, An Eye For An Eye.
next month will be modern versions of Greek myths (and maybe some actual ovid / euripides for background), starting with a Stone Blind
― koogs, Saturday, 29 April 2023 17:26 (eleven months ago) link
While continuing with self-deprecating, winking, swaggering Bono I've also started a short novel I've meant to read for years: Keith Waterhouse's first (?) novel THERE IS A HAPPY LAND, about childhood.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 29 April 2023 17:32 (eleven months ago) link
This week I reread True Grit by Charles Portis … marvel at his prose always, and was so swept up in the story i finished in a day or two. Love the drama of the last couple of chapters, the showdown, the pit, the skeleton (!) the snakes (!) … like a serialized drama where it all unfurls so excitingly. Also revisited Ask The Dust by John FanteBack in the day i loved this as a wide-eyed naive uni student dazzled by writerliness but two decades def blurred my memory of the misogyny & violence & racial slurs that make up a lot of the central narrative. Jesus. He writes beautifully and in its weird intensely Catholic way I do like the novel but damn this is a hard one to come to grips with as a fully -formed adult. It’s not even an “oh the times” argument, it’s like he was working out old personal shit on paper & is just like, a story mm yes its a story lot of that in literature I knowbut it’s one that definitely has hung around with me long after putting it down.
― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, 29 April 2023 17:54 (eleven months ago) link
What's another good Portis? I loved True Grit, although sometimes it felt a bit... cute? I can see why it appealed to the Coens.
I've just started "Vet's Daughter" by Barbara Comyns, which is sublimely miserable so far. It's so vivid and atmospheric, in so few words, without seeming telegraphed. Reminds me a little of... Roald Dahl? Like Dahl if he took abusers more seriously.
― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 29 April 2023 22:26 (eleven months ago) link
Dog of the South is my fave Portis
― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, 29 April 2023 22:30 (eleven months ago) link
^this is the justly celebrated canonical favorite
― The Lubitsch Touchscreen (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 29 April 2023 23:21 (eleven months ago) link
you really can’t go wrong w him imoi need to read gringos, that’s the only one of his i haven’t read
― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, 29 April 2023 23:59 (eleven months ago) link
I eventually made my way through all of them. Masters of Atlantis was the one that has stuck with me the longest, but they are all worthwhile reads. More than any author I can think of, his books grapple with what Wm. Carlos Williams wrote in his poem: "The pure products of America go crazy."
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 30 April 2023 00:11 (ten months ago) link
Library of America just put out a Portis Collected Works: https://loa.org/books/727-collected-works
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 30 April 2023 00:16 (ten months ago) link
I say it any chance I get: Masters of Atlantis is the funniest book I’ve ever read.
― Chris L, Sunday, 30 April 2023 01:42 (ten months ago) link
"in essence, part of reading him (for me) is finding the phrases and bits of language that really stand out and then burrowing in"
Yes, table, that was my impression - those moments of lucidity felt like they were cut into the text. It's interesting how readable those later books felt.
"xyzzzz, I forgot to add— glad yr finding something in Prynne’s work!"
I had that collection in my unread pile for a couple of years. Your posts on reading him encouraged me to have a run through it.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 30 April 2023 07:49 (ten months ago) link
I finished SILVERVIEW recently.
le carre: the thing he's actually good at (possibly)
― the pinefox, Sunday, 30 April 2023 13:38 (ten months ago) link
I’m halfway through Overstory now and it’s threatening to veer into love story schmaltz
― calstars, Sunday, 30 April 2023 17:01 (ten months ago) link
Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, by David Maraniss
― dow, Sunday, 30 April 2023 20:48 (ten months ago) link
In this case, Path Lit by Lighting was an approximate translation of Thorpe's Indian name.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Monday, 1 May 2023 14:02 (ten months ago) link
I finish Keith Waterhouse's THERE IS A HAPPY LAND (1957). It's all told by a small boy, in his own argot. Some of the children's speech rhythms and emphases (I don't mean the vocabulary) read oddly now. The story starts out seeming like it will be a sort of revelling in children's customs, but gradually grows darker. There is a suggestion of the danger that adults can pose. But the children themselves often seem to be the most dangerous and malicious characters. The book ends with poignancy and reflection. Waterhouse is very good on perceptions, thoughts, self-presentation, the ongoing negotiation within a conversation. He shows himself a shrewd, observant storyteller.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 2 May 2023 17:29 (ten months ago) link
Finished Francis Davis The History Of The Blues which ends with some oh so white rumination on who is preserving the genre which I could have done without. Told the story in a readable way but could do without that .
Finished Joana Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing which I will probably need to reread regularly if i get the opportunity. So could do with a copy. Do hope other people read this one I have currently borrowed and it doesn't just languish in a basement in Rathmines.
Started On Savage Shores how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock,her book telling the story of how from the first contact with Columbus at the turn of teh 15th/16th century which tends to be represented as Europe discovering a populated continent there had been traffic the other way too. Columbus came back to Spain with a few native individuals.& the number grew over the next couple of centuries. I'm in th introduction so far and she is talking about the population of Europe already being far more cosmopolitan than it has been represented since. Also what terms to refer to people from teh Americas with including the Aztecs which she's calling Aztec-Mexica so that people aren't totally confused by her dumping the traditional projected name used for teh alst few centuries. Anyway seems to be a good book and I like the writing so far. I've heard her interviewed on a few podcasts since hearing about this book a couple of months ago. Enjoyed what I heard.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 2 May 2023 18:07 (ten months ago) link
Needed some light reading so am working my way through Strong Female Character by the stand up comedian Fern Brad, which is a memoir about her being diagnosed with autism in her 30s. Really enjoying it so far.
After that it'll be Mel Brooks' memoir. Anyone on here read that one?
― bain4z, Wednesday, 3 May 2023 10:14 (ten months ago) link
I couldn’t find that I ever posted about reading The Stepford Wives but I loved it and have reread it about fifty times since. I saw Rosemary’s Baby in the kindle sale for 99p and bought it, read it in maybe three and a half hours.Levin reminds me very much of Margaret Atwood in the way he identifies and recontextualises horrific misogyny. So in Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary begs her original doctor to see her urgently and sits and calmly tells him everything that has gone on. She thinks the doctor has left the room to call the hospital, but instead he’s called her husband, who comes to pick her up. It’s something that is reported by many women; doctors often dismiss or ignore their symptoms, don’t trust them as adequately understanding their own bodies or feelings. From this Time article:
Women are more likely to be offered minor tranquilizers and antidepressants than analgesic pain medication. Women are less likely to be referred for further diagnostic investigations than men are. And women’s pain is much more likely to be seen as having an emotional or a psychological cause, rather than a bodily or biological one. Women are the predominant sufferers of chronic diseases that begin with pain. But before our pain is taken seriously as a symptom of a possible disease, it first has to be validated—and believed—by a medical professional. And this pervasive aura of distrust around women’s accounts of their pain has been enfolded into medical attitudes over centuries. The historical—and hysterical—idea that women’s excessive emotions have profound influences on their bodies, and vice versa, is impressed like a photographic negative beneath today’s image of the attention-seeking, hypochondriac female patient.
― Everybody's gonna get what they got coming (gyac), Thursday, 4 May 2023 16:50 (ten months ago) link
tpd is early iirc, and was out of print for a while - i had to pick up a second hand copy.
levin's big trick is to put the twist ending in the middle, spend the second half of the book living with the consequences.
my pick of his would be A Kiss Before Dying which does that masterfully.
Boys from Brazil, Sliver even, all worth reading
― koogs, Thursday, 4 May 2023 18:46 (ten months ago) link
(i was wrong, This Perfect Day is between R's Baby and Stepford)
― koogs, Thursday, 4 May 2023 18:49 (ten months ago) link
I bought A Kiss Before Dying as well
― Everybody's gonna get what they got coming (gyac), Thursday, 4 May 2023 19:02 (ten months ago) link
Always been curious about Perfect Day as it’s been lying around my parents house for a half century with this cover
― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, 4 May 2023 21:06 (ten months ago) link
Bono's SURRENDER reaches his work in the early 2000s on African debt and AIDS relief. This part of the book is not the most enjoyable.
Bono makes a case for the importance of the AIDS treatment based on his travels in Africa. He also describes his negotiations with US politicians to try to secure funding. He is very favourable about Condoleeza Rice and re: G. W. Bush, emphasises that he created the biggest healthcare initiative ever.
I found this difficult to read because I do not like those people. Bono says nothing about the other things that they did which many people thought were bad.
Separately, I find myself thinking that Bono could put lots of energy and ingenuity into campaigning for medicine in Africa - and I cannot criticise that - but he would never campaign for eg: socialised health in the USA, which I believe would also be good for many people. In some sense, I think, the latter is 'too political' for him. It doesn't fit his view of politics as something that you have to transcend.
― the pinefox, Friday, 5 May 2023 07:38 (ten months ago) link
Meanwhile I have started Nell Dunn's UP THE JUNCTION (1963). I think my vague idea of this book was that it was a 'kitchen sink novel'. But it's really more a series of vignettes, which appear to be quasi-documentary rather than primarily fictional. It contains a lot of dialogue which is unattributed - like hearing the voices on a Free Cinema documentary. It contains some flashes of striking prose.
The book is not very long. It belongs to the category of 'books that I have owned for a long time that I would like to read rather than constantly leaving them unread while I acquire new books'.
― the pinefox, Friday, 5 May 2023 07:42 (ten months ago) link
I started reading the introduction of Ed Yong's An Immense World where he sets up a thought experiment or scenario where several different animals and a young woman are in a large room together. So he compares what their sense experience is likely to be. I enjoyed what I read so far but am in the middle of several other books so I left it there for now.Book is about the experience of the world through what is understood of other animals' senses and what it tells us about the human experience. Have only come across him talking about the one imaginary woman so am assuming he is fully recognising neurodiversity.I think it is getting good reviews and teh podcast appearances I've heard have been quite good.
― Stevo, Friday, 5 May 2023 08:25 (ten months ago) link
Up The Junction turned into a BBC Ken Loach play that I think was reshown a couple of months ago and a film that has Dot Cotton from early years of Eastenders in . I noticed there were differences between the play and the film. Film may be truer to the book.Film had a great Manfred Mann theme song.
I have the book or at least read it a long time ago, probably early 90s. So probably picked it up from one of the Dublin cheap booksellers.
I think play was reshown, I certainly saw it so am assuming it was on tv rather than downloaded.
― Stevo, Friday, 5 May 2023 08:31 (ten months ago) link
I definitely want to read An Immense World. I'm currently taking a break from The Traveller of the Century to read Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel. So far seems to be a novel of characters, I generally prefer novels of plots but we'll see.
― ledge, Friday, 5 May 2023 08:37 (ten months ago) link
re up the junction: film is not in my opinion truer to the book
interesting maybe as a rare example of london-based kitchen sink (which tended to be a northern phenom)
― mark s, Friday, 5 May 2023 09:38 (ten months ago) link
"Dot Cotton from early years of Eastenders"
Think she was in late years also !
― the pinefox, Friday, 5 May 2023 09:50 (ten months ago) link
gyac, I've always been troubled by how well I thought the film of Rosemary's Baby depicts the things you mention - considering Polanski's own history, it felt to me like the sort of twisted compartmentalization of an abuser who has the intelligence and empathy to understand how gaslighting works and what effects it has on its victim while somehow still being able to indulge in it himself. now I'm wondering if I wasn't giving credit to Polanski that actually belongs to Levin.
pinefox, I think in addition to the things you mention it's worth being critical of the initiatives themselves, i.e. how much of the money actually goes where it should, how much profit is being made off the back of it, how much of this is PR and tax evasion, how much of it is top down "here Africans the white man has come to help you" as opposed to engaging with grass roots activists on the ground, etc.. of course I don't expect Bono himself to get into those issues.
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 5 May 2023 10:22 (ten months ago) link
The film version of Rosemary's Baby is famously faithful to the novel; iirc Polanski only omits a very minor subplot about Rosemary's sister.
― Ward Fowler, Friday, 5 May 2023 10:29 (ten months ago) link
xp I don't watch Eastenders so had assumed she would be long gone. It was funny seeing her as a teen in the late 60s film after seeing her in that though. I think Maureen Lipman is also in the film.
I used to go down to a clothing shop in Clapham in the mid 80s, bought a fringed suede jacket from there. Not really familiar with teh area otherwise. I think it was heavily gentrified since the book/play/film wasn't it?
― Stevo, Friday, 5 May 2023 10:34 (ten months ago) link
A funny thing about Bono's account is that he keeps going to see Republican senators who say "why should we give money to these African countries - they're riddled with corruption?". And Bono says "Senator, I appreciate that, but we're working on good governance ..."
The reason I find this funny (not in a very happy way) is that I believe that the Republican party is responsible for massive corruption in the USA.
― the pinefox, Friday, 5 May 2023 10:48 (ten months ago) link
The CIA's role in this corruption as the US and USSR used much of Africa for proxy wars also worth pointing out (though I grant this would not get republican senators onside).
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 5 May 2023 10:55 (ten months ago) link
I tried to get at this months ago, and perhaps caused some damage to my standing here, but will say what I meant then: Bono is a fucking idiot.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Friday, 5 May 2023 11:38 (ten months ago) link
Mary Renault - Funeral RitesIsabel Wilkerson - CasteGlyn Maxwell - The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 May 2023 11:51 (ten months ago) link
entirely agreed :)
― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 5 May 2023 11:51 (ten months ago) link
xp re Bongo I assumed that was well known.Is anybody stanning for him?Do hope his days as an automatic talking head are over or at least numbered.
Do remember walking behind him on Temple Bar and realising what a little man he was, not to be sizist or anything. But does make you wonder if the napoleon complex is a thing.
― Stevo, Friday, 5 May 2023 11:53 (ten months ago) link
the beginning of the gentrification of clapham is literally what "up the junction" is about (nell dunn moving there from fashionable chelsea in the late 50s)
― mark s, Friday, 5 May 2023 13:34 (ten months ago) link
Mary Renault - Funeral Rites
Funeral Games, innit?
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, 5 May 2023 17:52 (ten months ago) link
yep
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 May 2023 17:58 (ten months ago) link
I finished *Stepping Stones* the series of interviews with Seamus Heaney. It's 600 pages long and became oddly hypnotic the further along I got. Despite the Nobel prize, I don't think I'd fully metabolised his standing as a cultural figure (ignorance or provincialism, on my part?). Friends with Lowell and Bishop, Hughes and Brodsky; professorships at Harvard and Oxford; reading at Milosz's funeral. Still, there is a moment, after his stroke, when Clinton comes calling to his hospital bed, that the size of his achievement really dawned on me. I don't know why it should have been that when the work is right *there* but, somehow, the work operates - continues to work - on a different level. It's so thrumming and sinuous that *book* doesn't quite feel like the right word. Artefact, probably.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Sunday, 7 May 2023 20:38 (ten months ago) link
Now reading David Toop's *Sinister Resonance*. Even for Toop, this is episodic, fractured and abstract. The main threads of it are meditations on paintings and sculptures; the uncanny silences held within the frames, the subjects - particularly of Vermeer, di Chirico, Nicolaes Maes and Juan Muñoz. There are the usual excursions into place, artefacts and hypnagogia though, and he always makes me want to go back to the art - in whatever form it takes.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Sunday, 7 May 2023 20:51 (ten months ago) link
I took another break from the French Revolution and read The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. No need to comment. It's a classic.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 7 May 2023 23:21 (ten months ago) link
Only time for dissertation reading at the moment, but David Aitchison's The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism is a good read for anyone who is interested in any part of that title.
― niall horanburger (cryptosicko), Monday, 8 May 2023 18:27 (ten months ago) link
Meanwhile I have started Nell Dunn's UP THE JUNCTION (1963). I think my vague idea of this book was that it was a 'kitchen sink novel'. But it's really more a series of vignettes, which appear to be quasi-documentary rather than primarily fictional. It contains a lot of dialogue which is unattributed - like hearing the voices on a Free Cinema documentary. It contains some flashes of striking prose.The book is not very long.
The book is not very long.
― dow, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 03:28 (ten months ago) link
mark s says rare bit of London kitchen sink, pinefox's take makes it seem not dreary, maybe the more textured, restless shades of grey.
― dow, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 03:33 (ten months ago) link
The 2 adaptations, Ken Loach play and 68 film with manfred Mann soundtrack are both pretty good. I think BBC had the play on a few months back.& if the title pun isn't clear it's set in Clapham near the junction and there is a slang term Up The Junction which I thought was about being pregnant but may be more widely similar to up shit creek.
I thought the book was quite good but it has been a long time since I read it. Mark S was saying it was an outsiders view of teh area since teh writer had come from what had been a posher area and was relating her experiences in this place. It was just becoming a place that people were in teh process of gentrifying after I think it had been run down for a while. I think that had been a process in London for a while, to simplify area has cheap rents and somewhat decent property in bad repair so people on a budget move in do up the place they move into and word gets out so other people think its a fashionable area to live in so it gets a different reputation. I think that continues in a cycle until the population of a town becomes too high for it to do so. Possibly until rents are too high for people to be able to move around at all too. But I think Clapham went from being a pretty working class place to a far less so one.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 08:05 (ten months ago) link
May also depend on people being able to afford to actually buy the place they're doing up rather than improving things for a 3rd party landlord etc.Also aware that over last 100 years other populations have been added into the mix to greater degree. probably more recently here where mass Eastern European and African immigration suddenly massively increased in the early 2000s though there are areas of Dublin and elsewhere that had been concentrated points of immigrant living for much much longer.Europe did have a lot of further afield immigrants for hundreds of years but population in UK and elsewhere increased massively in the 20th century I think. Cosmopolitan population just hadn't been depicted as such until pretty recently, though I did notice that French films of the early 20th century did seem to have one black minor part or extra much more than English ones did. I watched a whole load of European films in a short time a couple of years ago.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 08:27 (ten months ago) link
my copy wd have been my mum's or my dad's, a classic pan paperback with this (excellent, somewhat misleading) cover:
https://i0.wp.com/maryrizza.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/upthejunction1j.jpg
― mark s, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 09:31 (ten months ago) link
Ken Loach play has at least one ton up boy in, which would fit in with the fashion of the girl on teh cover.As would teh semi bohemian ness of the author moving into an area like that possibly. Look is somewhat hip, somewhat sassy, from the era isn't it, without being mod or something.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 14:16 (ten months ago) link
Thanks yall! Seems to be current cover of trade pb---similar looking girl on other cover variants I'm seeing, wonder if this one is the author? Good pic anyway
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61gL1ATxTxL.jpg
― dow, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 18:54 (ten months ago) link
it's the original cover image from the 1963 hardback first edn and yes, i think it is her
(judging by other photos she enjoys an unexpected hat)
― mark s, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 19:01 (ten months ago) link
I have the Pan edition that Mark S shows.
As mentioned, the book is quite unusual in not being much of a novel, but more a set of documentary vignettes. It's short, so it wouldn't cost you much time to try reading it if interested.
Mark S was shrewd in suggesting that wealthy Nell Dunn's move to Clapham was the start of gentrification, but I add that in this book she is not transplanting a fancy middle-class lifestyle to a poor area (and thus changing it). Quite the opposite. She's (at least in the text, if not in real life) 'going native' like Orwell in his documentary books, making herself like one of the local women as much as possible - doing the work they do in their workplaces, going to their pubs and chip shops. I haven't quite yet discerned, from the book, the aim of this, unless it's simply to generate material to write about.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 19:06 (ten months ago) link
Thanks---yeah, looks like it might be her on that cover, since same woman on these covers of The Muse: a memoir of love at first sight and Talking With Women---several books here; what else is good? https://www.amazon.com/stores/Nell-Dunn/author/B001K8EHY6?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=trueI'm guessing UTJ is a good place to start.
― dow, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 19:19 (ten months ago) link
talking with women is p good iirc, proto-feminist interviews from the mid-60s (content self-explanatory)
― mark s, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 19:28 (ten months ago) link
reading dad lit in my capacity as a dad this month:
the wager by david grann (as excerpted in the new yorker https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-wager-david-grann-book-excerpt). this is a pretty good adventure story page turner. it aspires to be a cut above by talking about empire and colonialism, but the treatment there is so glib it adds little. i would recommend endurance by alfred lansing before this. good father's day gift if your dad likes master and commander.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands by timothy snyder. iirc i picked up this up shortly after the war in ukraine started, as it was regularly recommended to provide context for that. i learned a lot. it is, as they say, a good synthesis of a huge topic (of which ukraine's history is only part). i am not an expert, but i did find myself as little uncomfortable with one of the goals of the book, which is to compare hitler and stalin. that's a worthwhile goal if taken seriously, but in practice it sometimes (not always) ended up feeling he was ranking genocides like nate silver. good father's day book if your dad likes stalingrad.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 9 May 2023 19:37 (ten months ago) link
Making my way through Penman's Fassbinder book. Lots to like, lots to not like so much.
― bain4z, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 20:08 (ten months ago) link
I only know the screen version, but, in addition to the treatment of xpost Rosemary by her husband and doctor, who didn't even need to be witting accomplices of the Satanists, just in the classic tradition of husbands & doctors---seeingRosemary's Baby resonated on levels just now surfacing in my mind, re manipulation of the young, with females given their own special treatment, by fancy older people ov huge secret enthusiasms. I'm thinking Cold War etc. incl. what Trump later called the Deep State, although no need (beyond alibis) for that with him; he's his own worst enemy. Also what some post-Boomers now call the Gerontocracy: I've read that by 1972, the average American was 23 years old, herded by marketing studies also, well-developed by then.
― dow, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 21:24 (ten months ago) link
fancy older people ov huge secret enthusiasms
― dow, Tuesday, 9 May 2023 21:52 (ten months ago) link
I finished Grand Hotel, it was really good. It did start out like a carousel of rather unappealing characters but they were all treated sympathetically by Baum and their stories were expertly intertwined. Now on to Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - I'm so far not finding it quite the winning sibling of kafka and borges that it's trumpeted as. Most of the stories are about literary life - writing, getting published (or not), criticism - and though it's done with a surreal aspect and as a way of criticising soviet repression I'm not really into that kind of ouroborosity. And overall it doesn't have the broad psychological appeal of kafka or borges' pure genius.
― ledge, Wednesday, 10 May 2023 08:13 (ten months ago) link
Yeah I didn't think much of Krzhizhanovsky either. For some reason NYRB classics chose to put five books out by him.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 10 May 2023 10:26 (ten months ago) link
xpost Grand Hotel the movie is good too: Garbo, young Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery (as a tycoon, not in a prole role), and a host of Euro-seeming character actors, refreshingly unfamiliar to me.
― dow, Wednesday, 10 May 2023 17:05 (ten months ago) link
Just finished Dr. Wortle's School, the shortest Trollope I've ever read.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 10 May 2023 17:11 (ten months ago) link
Looking forward to reading the new David Grann, but I feel like I need to wait until I have a trip so I can read it as a proper dad airport book.
Recently finished Gogol's Dead Souls, and it's really enjoyable. Sam Bankman-Fried must have taken Chichikov as his model, right?
Here's what I've read so far this year:
Mat Johnson - PymStanislaw Lem - The Futurological CongressJonathan Lethem - The ArrestHernan Diaz - In the DistanceKatie Kitamura - IntimaciesGeorge Saunders - A Swim in the Pond in the RainAdrian Tchaikovsky - Children of MemoryJordan Castro - The NovelistMezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe - Really the BluesNikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
― Random Restaurateur (Jordan), Wednesday, 10 May 2023 17:18 (ten months ago) link
I'm about halfway through the Leena Krohn collection now. It's got a certain rhythm and obscurity that keep me reading.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, 10 May 2023 20:40 (ten months ago) link
I finished UP THE JUNCTION. I add that its vignettes could be reassembled in almost any order, and that it contains a series of line drawings by Susan Benson.
I'm reading a literary critical work: WYNDHAM LEWIS & MODERNISM (2004) by an academic critic called A. Gasiorek. It's very sharply written and well informed. Anyone wanting a short introduction to Lewis could start here.
― the pinefox, Friday, 12 May 2023 10:17 (ten months ago) link
Does anyone have any feelings about the best translation of Radetsky March?
I think Michael Hoffman takes quite a lot of liberties with his translation, but he seems to be a pithier writer than the other translator, Joachim Neugroschel.
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 12 May 2023 14:32 (ten months ago) link
Never read Neugroschel's translation of RM but I like some of his other translations.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 12 May 2023 18:49 (ten months ago) link
Today I began Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book, a “literary supercut” novel that contains none of Comitta’s original work, just his arrangement of depictions of “nature” from other novels. Has been getting good press, and so far, it’s quite good if occasionally a little goofy.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Friday, 12 May 2023 19:09 (ten months ago) link
After finishing A New World Begins I feel like I have a much better grasp of the arc of the French Revolution from the crises that led to Louis XVI calling the original États généraux in 1789 up to Bonaparte's coronation as emperor in 1804. Even allowing for the compression necessary to encompass all of it into 560 pages, it sounded exhausting.
I'm going to watch a movie tonight and wait until tomorrow to pick my next book.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Sunday, 14 May 2023 00:21 (ten months ago) link
Talking about NYRB's books that aren't all that, I have just finished Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy.To its credit, it was bad enough that I immediately found the motivation to reread The Brothers Karamazov.
― Nabozo, Sunday, 14 May 2023 13:55 (ten months ago) link
Lol I love Krudy.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 14 May 2023 14:38 (ten months ago) link
Granted, he has phenomenal descriptions of seasons and time passing in his Hungarian countryside, his metaphors are wild and fun. The man-woman carnival on the other hand...
― Nabozo, Sunday, 14 May 2023 15:57 (ten months ago) link
I can't remember it's been so long. I think the prose reads wonderfully well in English, all of these great descriptions of life in full colours. He is possibly like Joseph Roth -- in his relationship with a vanished past of Austro-Hungary -- but there aren't enough translations and most that are there aren't easy to find.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 14 May 2023 22:42 (ten months ago) link
I'm struggling with The Traveller of the Century. It was pretty entertaining at first, and it's exceptionally clever, but the '18th century novel written in the 21st century' schtick is wearing thin after 400 pages, and though it's centered on a love story and has lots of theorising about love, it's very much a novel of the head, not of the heart.
― ledge, Wednesday, 17 May 2023 08:38 (ten months ago) link
Caliban and the Witch Sylvia federiciI have only read the introduction so far. Heard teh The Book ON Fire podcast breakdown over teh last few weeks so thought I'd read teh text. It's one of several I have on teh go though so hoping to get it done by end of month isnce there may be a queue.I'm going to listen to that Podcast's series on David Graeber's The Dawn Of Everything after having had his book nn Debt recommended by Deforrest Brown last weekend. Or probably would have done so anyway. THink I need to read a few of graeber's have heard other podcasts talking about his posthumous one on Pirate Enlightenment too. Have his Bullshit Jobs around teh bed so will get to that soon hopefully.
Timeleess Adventures Brian J RobbThought I'd read a few things on the history of the show. having seen the series through a couple of times.Pretty brief overview that tries to tie the stories depicted in the show into contemporary cultural events etc. Just about works I think. Talks about the usage of sets etc from historical drama being shot by the BBC and refers to the Victorian style including Jon Pertwee bringing in his grandfather's cape. Like it's visible that there is a style from that rough era late Victorian/early 20th century running through at least the first run of Doctors that should be visible to anybody who knew anything about the history of clothing. Victoriana and Edwardiana had a couple of revivals in the 60s and 70s which is also visible in the show at points.
Martin Hayes Shared Notes Memoir by Irish fiddle player which came out last year. I've seen him play locally a few times and had heard about his famous pairing with Dennis Cahill much earlier. I think I need to pick up his current cd Peggy's Dream.So far still in childhood where he is working on his dad's farm and absorbing the influence of people playing traditional music which his dad was also involved in. Think I have too many thing son teh go at teh same time and maybe should be concentrating on a couple less. But do very much want to read this and like everything else i've picked up recently.
Not A Nation Of Immigrants Roxanne Dunbar Ortizher book on settler colonialism with a title refuting the one chosen by JFK for his book which set a paradigm of thought.She's looked through the various minority ethnicities in the US and problems they have had to face. I've had this as my loo book so it's probably taken me longer to read than it should have done but I think it's really good. Have meant to read this since it was released so glad to have got it mostly done.
Bright boulevards, bold dreams : the story of black Hollywood Donald BogleVery interesting book so far looking at teh very early days of Hollywood. I'm still in the 1920s at the moment and should be spending more time with this. It's an enjoyable read. So I'll probably need to follow it up with others by him.
― Stevo, Wednesday, 17 May 2023 09:31 (ten months ago) link
I finished WYNDHAM LEWIS & MODERNISM. It's a short, sharp book. The writing is crisp and compact. The book is very philosophically knowledgeable - and it's about Lewis's political, and to a degree philosophical, thought, if anything more than his fiction.
Lewis has a bad name politically, especially among people who don't know much about his writing. He's actually a more interesting and elusive character than many people would think; in some ways a very substantial and challenging social thinker. Nonetheless I'd quite like to see a straight take-down of him by George Orwell, who I think would have been better able to cut through Lewis's facade of style and posture than any other contemporary.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 17 May 2023 09:55 (ten months ago) link
Wasn’t Lewis a pretty notorious anti-semite?
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Wednesday, 17 May 2023 12:09 (ten months ago) link
Having finally seen the film I take Michael Wood's BELLE DE JOUR (2000) from the library. It starts by quoting singer Richie Havens.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 18 May 2023 08:37 (ten months ago) link
How Racism Survived U.S. History David Roedigerexploration of race in U.S. History. Quite enjoying it , but do wish it had as bibliography.Filling in more details of some events I'm already largely aware of. But does seem to be good to have this in one place in a shortish book,
400 Years of Fashion Natalie Rothstein1999 reissue of a classic text on a V&A museum exhibition on fashion history in the UK. I thought i could pick up some more pointers on how things developed over time and I'm not sure this is the right book for that. I did find a book that i had meant to read for a while that is better on the process of how things actually developed so ordered that yesterday. This is a collection of photos of pretty exquisite clothing though so I will see what i can pick up on and incorporate into my own designs as per usual.
― Stevo, Thursday, 18 May 2023 09:37 (ten months ago) link
I'm about to finish, at kingfish's rec, Cold War and Civil Rights. I'll start Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room today.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 18 May 2023 09:41 (ten months ago) link
Currently alternating between two rather desultory experiences:
The Exhibitionist, Charlotte Mendelson - Book club pick. Family drama about a sculptor couple and their children. Father is an emotionally abusive and manipulative monster, rest of family brainwashed into putting his needs above their own. No subtelty in the writing whatsoever: father is unpleasant and pathetic in every way at all times, leaving you at a loss for why any of the other characters put up with him. It is mentioned that he can be disarmingly charming at times, but crucially this is told, not shown, so we get no feeling for it. I dunno, it just kinda feels like venting?
The Magic Box, Rob Young - Supposedly a history of the hauntological/folk horror-y aspects of British television, though it starts off by mentioning a bunch of big screen features - Village Of The Damned, The Damned, the Hammer Quatermass films. I'm a bit at a loss to what the book's mission statement is, outside of being a nostalgic trawl through 60's and 70's UK popcult that a certain type (me) enjoys. It doesn0t focus enough on the behind the scenes to get into the structural changes of those times, and while each artefact is given a cursory social history interpretation there doesn't seem to be any kind of overarching theory as to What It All Means either. Totally wrong on The Damned as well, suggesting that the bikers show that the film thinks the greatest threat is americanization, when the film makes it pretty explicit the hooligans are victims of the British establishment as much as the children are.
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 18 May 2023 10:37 (ten months ago) link
I read his Electric Eden and quite enjoyed it . It did seem to take off on some wild diversions including I think a longish fictional section. I was surprised by vehement negative reaction against it by some including Richard Morton Jack.Haven't read anything else book form by him . He did edit the Wire for a while didn't he, or was it just write there?
Looking forward to reading RMJ's book on Nick Drake when I get a chance.
― Stevo, Thursday, 18 May 2023 11:01 (ten months ago) link
Young edited The Wire. His writing is just not my bag for reasons I forget now.
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 18 May 2023 11:09 (ten months ago) link
It's been about a year since my last Barbara Pym novel, so I'm back to get another dose of the vicars in the form of An Unsuitable Attachment.
Pym always manages to generate a goodly amount of wryly bemused comedy out of the scrupulous social hesitations and incessant trivial quandaries faced by the respectable mid-20th century English middle classes, but especially the women. And yes, I did just write a highly congested pile-up of adverbs and adjectives. I only did what had to be done.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:38 (ten months ago) link
This month's book club selection is So Brave, Young and Handsome, by Leif Enger. I'm about a third of the way through. As much as I want to dislike this book as a "fresh" take on the Western, I can't deny the pull of Enger's prose. It's utterly charming. Will report back as the story develops.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:54 (ten months ago) link
Thanks again. Seems like on ILM several readers have reported finding Electric Eden useful for info and recharging enthusiasm, living up to this, apparently:
“Rob Young's ambitious Electric Eden presents a flip side to the well-known story of the evolution of electric rock in Britain in the 1960s, a story of the rediscovery of England's native folk music in the early 20th century by the likes of William Morris and Cecil Sharp, who went from town to town recording and notating the music that would hold great sway with those musicians who became associated with England's less loud, more earthy music--the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Davy Graham, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, and many others would each deploy traditional folk music to their own ends in various recombinant ways, writing new songs laced with the idealism of the exploding sixties youth culture, while paying homage to the spirit and traditions of old. Eventually the tide of this music swelled to inspire some of the most influential names in electric rock, from the Beatles and Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. Thoroughly researched and well written, this book uncovers the secret history of British popular music in the sixties and beyond. Highly recommended.” ―Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth
― dow, Thursday, 18 May 2023 19:07 (ten months ago) link
I liked *Electric Eden*, though I think I felt like Daniel does about *The Magic Box*: it's a fantastic work of archaeology but the archival instinct is so all-consuming, it ultimately outruns itself. Or, less politely, it goes on a bit. I've just discovered the long-ass review I wrote about it, which, well, goes on a bit: https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/book-reviews/the-history-of-british-music-rob-youngs-electric-eden-36400
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Thursday, 18 May 2023 19:20 (ten months ago) link
I finished David Toop's *Sinister Resonance*, which I enjoyed a great deal. It's a book that attempts to locate the uncanny nature of sound - its immaterial nature, its ephemerality, its placelessness. It's an impossible project, but one that allows Toop to explore a range of mediums: paintings, novels, sculpture, autobiographical sketches, but, oddly, barely any music at all. Central texts are *Moby Dick*, lots of MR James, Joyce, Woolf and Proust, and, unsurprisingly, lots of Beckett. He also looks at the implied sound in the Dutch masters, particularly Nicholaes Maes. There are some great passages where he's simply sitting in his back garden in the dark, listening to the sound of snails nibbling his hostas.
I think it was somewhere on here that a link was made between him and Iain Sinclair and that's a good shout. There's something in the way they navigate the library that is completely alien to me (someone once said the same of Foucault), and, like the Young books discussed above, there is a sense that it was only a deadline that stopped Toop, not any attempt at a unifying principle. Ultimately, like Sinclair, I could read him all day, and would happily re-read the book from the start.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Thursday, 18 May 2023 19:32 (ten months ago) link
Excellent--- and I can see from your Young take, more than ever, that I'm going to have to read the damn book at some point(as well as Toop's)---and you end with the questions that your descriptions led me toward--as far as the possibility of a visionary pushing past-through nostalgia and intimations x certainty of a fraught future (we know the environmental factors as well or better than we care to, but not how and when things will shake out, though the timeline keeps bumping forward in latest projections), since this is ILB, I'll mention a writer who sure tries, if with mixed results, having his own struggles with nostalgia, and that is Kim Stanley Robinson.
I hope that Young cites Richard Thompson as a folk-rock songwriter who has never dealt much in nostalgia, except his occasionally overt conservative-reactionary tendencies could be a form of that, although never really "It used to be better dammit," more just disgust or sere vibe/sound, then on to something else. Occasional roots-work-outs are mainly for fun now, the scenic route to that (with a little mental cosplay if ye like).
― dow, Thursday, 18 May 2023 20:10 (ten months ago) link
Thompson does build from the lyrical-lurid arterial trees of many ancient sources, pop artistry before pop (like Harry Smith turns into liner notes' tabloid headlines drawn from the musical contents of his Smithsonian Anthology). RT's "Beeswing" effectively (whatever his conscious intention) comments on the possible consequences of this kind of appetite, incl. on male collector-questlovers, as the waltzing wild child, now seen as increasingly self-destructive, keeps telling the earnest ex-bf narrator, "You wouldn't have me any other way." (perhaps Thompson does relate this to his own interests, having since used the song's title for that his memoir of youth, which he's said involves not-always-the-right-decisions).
On the negative, reactionary side, when he was offended by Sting's rain forest advocacy, this son of a London cop songfully sneered at the son of a Newcastle area milkman for being a "little Geordie" who didn't know his place (also by being much more $uccessful than Thompson, while rarely being as much an artist: white trash with money)---I wonder if Young's book deals with classism and related matters?
― dow, Thursday, 18 May 2023 21:05 (ten months ago) link
I finish Bono's memoir SURRENDER. It's long, eloquent, wry, warm, informative, amusing, perhaps sometimes wise. If you like Bono, it's the book you might have hoped Bono could write. Its weaknesses are a) a tendency sometimes to lift off toward generality, b) the 'centrist' blandness of its political statements and outlooks, which I've commented on extensively before.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 18 May 2023 21:42 (ten months ago) link
Clarice Lispector - Too much of Life (Complete Chronicles). There is over 700 pages of her columns (mostly written for the main Rio paper Journal do Brasil), mostly from the early 70s (in the afterword her son claims she was sacked from the job due to antisemitism). Clarice Lispector's writing is borne out of a pure knack for it. She started early; I don't know if she was massively well read but what she had was a knack for putting words together that can really pierce into you. She is a bit like a spiritualist in her outlook in the way she goes within and is able to access all things that to us is like a blob, but she is able to make sense of it -- both to her and her readers. In her 'novels' (she is often bored by the form and her books were never exactly novels anyway) that concentration yields often strange, beguiling works that have been mistaken for the modernism of Joyce or Beckett but there was nothing like that kind of program as such. The most interesting stuff as far as the linking these pieces to her novels goes are the relationships with her maids, but otherwise the outside world doesn't get into her works.
In these newspaper pieces however, she is very much aware of readers, and what it is to be writing for a public that will read a page of hers over a coffee. She is often interviewing a singer, a painter, or going to a party with a fellow writer. At the time there was a dictatorship in Brazil, and student protests, so she sided with them in simple solidarity. There is lots here if you are interested in Brazilian culture of that period. Unfortunately the writing here isn't as good as when she uses the page to go within and find something that no one else could. So as a collection its very up and down. For anyone who is a fan is a must but its not a keeper. It probably needs selection, a bit of curation, if you wanted to get pissy about its worth or whatever. Which I don't really want to. If you like what she does you have to read this.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 19 May 2023 13:19 (ten months ago) link
al-Hariri - Impostures. Just near the end of this medieval Arabic work. 50 'Impostures' (in short 5-10 pages), within, where the hero Abu Zayd (and as the title implies) is a confidence trickster who uses his cunning to get out of a 'situation'. Usually by talking his way out of it. The approach for this translation is unique as each of them are translated in a chosen style of English. It could be based on an Anglo writer -- from Austen to Gertrude Stein to Chaucer to someone obscure like Margery Kempe (the last Imposture describes the narrator's supposed change of ways to leading a more ethical life, so Kempe is seen as a fit -- or it could a particular Anglo dialect (so there's Maori English to Caribbean, just many many 'dialects', if you like). If you wanted a short compilation of styles of English this could function as the book for you. But as book of tales to enjoy I am not sure this helps in establishing a fluency. In some ways its trying to play with the conumdrum of translation where accuracy can often impinge on the flow of the target language, so how about imitations? Except that having to go from one style of English to the next is quite jarring on this read. I wonder if you could have a re-telling in one way instead. Anyway, I reckon this is a pretty important book (as far as these things go), in terms of showcasing the approach and getting an Arabic writer -- who sounds unclassifiable -- out there.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 19 May 2023 13:52 (ten months ago) link
What's the best place to start with her? Story collections, novels, nonfiction--like the columns etc--or does she have memoirs presented as such?
― dow, Friday, 19 May 2023 19:22 (ten months ago) link
The Passion According to G.H.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 19 May 2023 20:41 (ten months ago) link
Overstory has its flaws I guess but it really has opened up the world of trees to me
― calstars, Friday, 19 May 2023 23:14 (ten months ago) link
I finish Michael Wood's BELLE DE JOUR (2000). Brisk, pacy, improvisational in tone, dry, providing some very close readings of film at time, drawing on much learning. MW constantly refers to European art films I've never seen. If you like the film this book is very worthwhile. But not to be read till you've seen the film.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 20 May 2023 16:14 (ten months ago) link
Listening to an audiobook of The Day of the Locust. It's a cracking read, not least because of the reader. I'm a sucker for tales of old decadent Hollywood, and this is the ur-text.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 20 May 2023 18:53 (ten months ago) link
day of the locust feat.homer simpson
― mark s, Saturday, 20 May 2023 19:11 (ten months ago) link
Yes, Homer Simpson, the poor slob.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 20 May 2023 19:13 (ten months ago) link
Kincaid, Brian W. AldissSlifkin, The New Monuments and the End of ManThreadgill, Easily Slip into Another World
― alimosina, Sunday, 21 May 2023 04:40 (ten months ago) link
I bought Day Of The Locust thinking it was Day Of The Triffids and got very confused.
― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 21 May 2023 09:56 (ten months ago) link
I know there's at least one film of it that I saw years ago. NOt sure if i read the book or have a copy lying around the flat somewhere. Did hear it was pretty good though.
also have a copy of Otto Friedrich's City of Nets which is about Hollywood in the 40s. Thought I would get to that faster have heard that is really good too. More non-fiction but I think it should relate. Though it may be showing teh town a couple of decades later.
― Stevo, Sunday, 21 May 2023 10:06 (ten months ago) link
actually more the next decade than a couple of decades later. I was thinking Locust was 20s for some reason.
― Stevo, Sunday, 21 May 2023 10:09 (ten months ago) link
Day of the Locusts was on tptv in the uk quite a bit at the start of the year
― koogs, Sunday, 21 May 2023 10:34 (ten months ago) link
donald sutherland plays homer s -- which for a long while convinced me that groening derived the omnipresent cast in a simpsons character's eyes from sutherland's
except the life in hell characters always already had this same cast so i guess it's a convergent evolution (which is even weirder tbh)
― mark s, Sunday, 21 May 2023 10:40 (ten months ago) link
Riku Onda - THE AOSAWA MURDERS. beguiling and fascinating murder mystery with intriguing structure. unfortunately i was completely baffled by the ending in that I don't really understand what happened or whodunnit. perhaps that was the point but give me an agatha christie any day. still at least I enjoyed 280 of the 312 pages.
― oscar bravo, Sunday, 21 May 2023 16:21 (ten months ago) link
(did we have a 'spoilers please' thread where we get people to tell us what happened in things we didn't understand? or did i imagine it / mean to start one and not get around to it?)
― koogs, Sunday, 21 May 2023 16:25 (ten months ago) link
Hell yes!
― dow, Sunday, 21 May 2023 18:18 (ten months ago) link
The Libertine Louis AragonFrench surrealist book comprising of a series of vignettes. First one is a play in short scenes and snatches of dialogue about a Prince going to Russia. Preface is pretty interesting too. I've had this out of the library for the last month and a half and not really looked ta it. Hopefully going to get through it rapidly since the individual stories are pretty short. I took a trip out to a satellite town of here and looked through their library and saw a number of titles that I want to read. Was already at the limits of amountof books i could take out or would have a couple of other titles I possibly also wouldn't have looked at properly.Gt this with anthology of writing on racism by Martin Bulmer which has some really interesting excerpts in. What I read of that was good but been sidetracked by other books for the last while. & amassing a load more taht will hang over me for a while.
ric Yong An Immense WorldHave had this sitting beside teh bed with the Introduction partially read for the last month. I think I just finished the introduction and got into the main part of teh book. Book is about the world taht animal senses create that they live in.So far I've had a thought I had about Thomas Nagel's What iT's Like tO be a Bat confirmed or at least supported by Yong. In that a fleeting visit to a place where one was sensing things in the same way as a given animal does is far from the same thing as actually understanding the world as experienced as that animal. When we did this in Philosophy20 years ago I was thinking of the scene in the Sword in the Stone where the two wizards fleetingly jump from animal form to animal form in comparison . That the wizards would not be experiencing the world in the way their external form would suggest, I was thinking the difference between appearance and immersed experience was like an impermeable membrane one couldn't cross. I think the original author's idea of what it was like for Merlin and Walt to be experiencing what it was like to be an animal had a different understanding though. I don't think that would be right myself, one would be aware of one's double consciousness and fleeting visit etc.Anyway great thought provoking book on the subject that already looks extremely promising and I haven't got far into it yet. Introduction was good in itself. I think I need to read his other book too, I Contain Multitudes the one on microbes.
Martin Hayes Shared NotesIrish fiddler virtuoso memoir. So far I've got as far as him learning to play and joining his first band. Also heading outto a high school beyond teh county border .Pretty great view of a rural childhood in Clare, I'm enjoying this. So would recommend it as well as his latest cd Peggy's Dream where he's put together pretty much a super group and put out a sublime set touching on jazz, possibly minimalism and traditional Irish folk.
Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped AfricaGuyanan radical writer's book on history and development of the continent of Africa and how it was mishandled and diverted by Europe. I'm just starting the main book after reading the Introduction which looks into the writer's assassination and background and stuff. But a book I've been waiting to read for a while. Took an age on order with the library system but never appeared so I bought it a few months back and have since been trying to get to it by reading the rest of books I'd started before it. Anyway
― Stevo, Monday, 22 May 2023 11:04 (ten months ago) link
Re: The Day of the Locust, I've never seen the film. The book was a quick read/listen, and while his prose was stellar I thought the ending was rushed. At the same time, it was suitably apocalyptic. I definitely want to see the film now.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Monday, 22 May 2023 14:11 (ten months ago) link
I downloaded it earlier so have it to look forward to.
― Stevo, Monday, 22 May 2023 14:47 (ten months ago) link
Tove Jansson: Work And Love, Tuula Karjalainen - Jansson biog by Finnish art historian, thus clearly written for a Finnish audience, not holding your hand over things like the Winter War, the Swedish-Finnish community or the art world of early 20th century Helsinki. Which is fine, I'd rather have stuff go over my head than feel spoken down to. Very early days in this yet, but very cool to see the focus so far on her youthful work as a painter and illustrator, moomins meriting little more than the stray mention so far (I'm sure they'll take over soon enough). Her father, an archetypal Terrible Man, was a sculptor, and the book directs you to where his works can be found (an advantage of this particular art, I guess - once you've got something in the public square inertia means it's likely to stay for a good while). Her mother was Finnland's first great postage stamp artist!
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 22 May 2023 14:59 (ten months ago) link
After finishing An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym I have a hard time understanding what her publisher could have been thinking by rejecting it in 1963. It had to wait for posthumous publication in 1982. It was well up to her standards and made me laugh out loud several times.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 22 May 2023 18:20 (ten months ago) link
Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's *A Time to Keep Silence*, a short book about various monasteries Fermor visited or stayed at in the 1950s. There's something unreal about Fermor. He lived a bizarre, extraordinary life. One brief section of his Wiki page reads:
He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute, and was among a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to the occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander, Major General Heinrich Kreipe.[14]
For all that, everything carries the taint of privilege; as such, this kind of asceticism though partly born of genuine curiosity can also feel performative. There's something so luxuriant about his prose at times, that I find myself snorting - wanting to tug a forelock in admiration but also wanting to toss the book aside. I'm here for the polyglot virtuosity, the specialist vocabularies, for the lone enraptured male loose in the bowels of a monastery meditating on the transience of life, but I don't know, it feels problematic.
Then something like this happens and I'm gliding along his sentences like a supplicant.
[The monasteries] emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled in bracken and blackberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken spandrels that fly spinning over the tree tops in slender trajectories, the clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose window in the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant had been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Tuesday, 23 May 2023 18:59 (ten months ago) link
more of Ed Yong's An Immense World.got through first chapter where he talks about smell and taste and how they are experienced and differentiated. Really enjoying this . So yeah recommend it. Think I'll definitely be looking to read his other one after this.But maybe I shouldn't keep adding new books to my currently reading active pile.
to which I just addedLinda Nochlin Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists.the book which is part of the birth of feminist art criticism. & If I had been more on top of things i mjight have got as part of an anthology of her work that I've seen is in the library system. NOt as yet sure if exactly the same edit of the main essay is in that though. So may well order that once I'm through here. Have listened to a few podcasts on her and interviews with her in the run up to this arriving. Want to know more. Seemed to be a title that should have some interesting discussion behind. I think the one complaint i saw about this was that there was very little reflection on artists of colour in here. I did hear her bring up the lack of recognition of artists of other ethnicities in the interview though. Oh well, looking forward to this.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 23 May 2023 19:00 (ten months ago) link
Started another audiobook, Lampedusa by Steven Price. I really enjoyed By Gaslight. This is completely different; it's a novel about the last years of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of The Leopard, when he was diagnosed with emphysema and began work on the book. Price was published as a poet before he started writing novels. His prose really sings, and his storytelling is quite intricate and recursive.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 23 May 2023 19:10 (ten months ago) link
A Time to Keep Silence is a great book!
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 23 May 2023 22:35 (ten months ago) link
heinrich von kleist - michael kohlhaas
― flopson, Tuesday, 23 May 2023 22:42 (ten months ago) link
Martin Amis, THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ (1981). I won't read or reread it all.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 09:22 (ten months ago) link
Love Kleist's short stories, great stuff.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 09:27 (ten months ago) link
You have doubtless seen it, Chinaski, but if not the Archers' Ill Met by Moonlight is a pretty funny 1957 fabulation of PLF's time bamboozling Nazis on Crete, starring Dirk Bogarde in an implausible moustache.
― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 09:55 (ten months ago) link
I finished Tanizaki's The Maids, started Amis' The Information.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 24 May 2023 10:03 (ten months ago) link
Kleist is one of my favourite short story writers ever. Michael Kohlhaas is a must as far as novellas go.
The translation on Archipelago collates all of these.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 10:20 (ten months ago) link
A Wreath for Udomo, Peter Abrahams. A fictionalised account of an African independence movement, written in 1956 before the first tropical african country gained independence. The prose is kind of middle of the road but it's engaging and an interesting glimpse into the optimism of that era.
― ledge, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 11:08 (ten months ago) link
Killers of the flower moon
― calstars, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 13:07 (ten months ago) link
Thanks for the heads up Piedie - my Powell and Pressburger knowledge stops at the Small Back Room so will have to check this one out.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Wednesday, 24 May 2023 15:45 (ten months ago) link
my post about xp Killers of the Flower Moon on the True Crime thread started w impression that it was a kind of slo-mo, long game, Oklahoma hill country version of the Oklahoma City Black Wall Street Massacre, but more "rational" in a way because making money from murder, with the cultural x class corruption---mostly local, but extending as far as Washington when nec., also entwined with the class-racial etc layers of curruption already there, entwined with interests in other parts of the nation and other nations---not really that rational, not nec so prudent, the longer the process, the legal ramifications, and and the author's research go on. For one example, as soon as someone thought to compare local and other death rates of that era, obvious disparities were found. And many deaths, not necessarily related to anyone's known financial gain, to any other motivation, were never investigated very thoroughly, if at all.
That's back in the day, but eventually the author meets descendants of the victims (and, in some cases, their killers), still conducting their own research.
― dow, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 16:37 (ten months ago) link
meaning descendants of victims *and* of their killers
― dow, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 16:39 (ten months ago) link
cultural x class corruption---mostly local, but extending as far as Washington when nec.
― dow, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 16:50 (ten months ago) link
Although, at least in the first reading, I sometimes felt like the author's process of investigating the evil process, following the blood money and emerging madness, felt like the chain of whites, incl the notorious J. Edgar and his investigators, reliable and otherwise, could overshadow the Indians, including ones (usually "mixed")who had actually achieved some standing in the visible, ostensible means of governance beyond tribal councils. But in the concluding section, when the author gets to know xpost descendants, points of view, also questions, expand quite a bit.
― dow, Wednesday, 24 May 2023 17:09 (ten months ago) link
I'm reading Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg. She writes about memories of her family and their circle of acquaintances, but her handling of the material is a bit peculiar. For one thing, she is usually peripheral to the incident she is relating. It feels more like a novel about how families create an internal identity, but a novel that was subjected to the discipline of only using personal memories of her own family. I'm enjoying it.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 29 May 2023 22:18 (ten months ago) link
Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by matthew campbell and kit chellel sounded appealing when it was reviewed in the LRB a couple of months back and indeed it was. vaguelly le carre esque in themes and settings, but non-fiction and more plodding in style. perhaps could have been a long new yorker article (or, presumably as it will be, a movie) rather than an entire book, but if you like this kind of stuff then it works at book length.
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I'm not in any way looking forward to the nolan oppenheimer movie, but i do drive past a huge billboard every day and it finally prompted me to read the canonical doorstop biography of him. pretty good! at the risk of stating the obvious, the guy who built the atom bomb was an interesting and in many ways awful person. if a book about that sounds interesting then you will like this.
i started reading the new cormac mccarthy duology right after this without knowing that it's (afaict) a fictional retelling (?) of the (incredibly fucked up irl) life of oppenheimer's kids (daughter took her own life, son ended up a carpenter in NM). i need a break from oppenheimer though, so i'll read those another time.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 30 May 2023 16:14 (nine months ago) link
In the almost ultimate case of "finally reading books I've owned for many years", I at last start on John Braine's ROOM AT THE TOP.
It's surprisingly well-written and moves along quite fast.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 31 May 2023 08:44 (nine months ago) link
I read Amy Key's ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE - an essay-memoir, sparked by her love of Joni Mitchell's Blue, exploring how to live a life without romantic love (AK is in her 40s and hasn't had a partner since her early 20s). Really timely, powerful book, and, among other things, a great work of experiential music criticism - managing to talk about how songs and albums linger in our lives as models, goals, goads to frame our desires and regrets, without ever seeming to reduce them to the kind of prosaic lists-as-autobiography endemic to a lot of blokeish music writing. At the heart of the book is her relationship with the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden - he adored her, but they became friends with benefits (the benefits being cooking, drinking and reading together). It describes quite graphically RL's messy demise and how alcohol-related illness ravaged him mentally and physically. I knew RL a little, and this bit made me feel uncomfortable and wonder how legitimate it is to write this way about friends who have died, can't consent etc. AK is full of awe and praise for RL as a poet, teacher, mentor and friend but also describes the awful squalor of his final months. Personally think I might have been too squeamish to include...
Now reading I'M A FAN by Sheena Patel - really gripping, novel about a woman spiralling into paranoid obsession via stalking a bloke she's sleeping with, his wife and his other gf, via their Instagram stories. Maps the psychodynamics of fandom onto broader social/cultural/post-colonial relations in a way that feels really provocative and suggestive rather than didactic. Feel like I need to go for a long walk without my phone after every chapter though.
― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, 31 May 2023 12:24 (nine months ago) link
Gregor von Rezzori - The Death of my Brother Abel. Stopped this halfway through, just didn't want another 300 pages of a 'failed' novel.
I liked the span of it (from end of Austro-Hungary, to the annexation of Austria, to the polo playing set of the late 60s), but the narrator who writes screenplays but wanted to be a proper novelist gets a bit tiresome. He should've embraced it, and written for TV.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 31 May 2023 15:15 (nine months ago) link
Recently read:
― Random Restaurateur (Jordan), Wednesday, 31 May 2023 15:29 (nine months ago) link
Philip Roth - American Pastoral - really enjoyed this. The frame narrative is interesting, it just glides into the main portion of the book being imagined by the narrator (Zuckerman) based on very little "real" information about the Swede, and then never returns to the frame.
Kelly Link - White Cat, Black Dog - very enjoyable and well-exected folk tale rewrites.
Nick Harkaway - Titanium Noir - tight and pulpy sci-fi detective story set in a world where some rich people have access to an immortality drug that also makes them physically larger and less human with every dose.
― Random Restaurateur (Jordan), Wednesday, 31 May 2023 15:35 (nine months ago) link
Michael Broers - Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 31 May 2023 15:37 (nine months ago) link
― Random Restaurateur (Jordan), Wednesday, May 31, 2023
I really loved this book. It starts out like a modern retelling of The Book of Job, about a successful unwavering man who loses everything but who still doesn't lose his faith
except that by the end of this story he concludes that everyone he knows may have a veneer of respectability but that they engage in subversive behaviors, and that he cannot understand the truth about anyone based upon their conduct.
― Dan S, Thursday, 1 June 2023 00:26 (nine months ago) link
Just finished Mixed Up Files of Basil Frankweiler, which was fun but no Harriet the Spy.
And I’m about 150 pages into Lonesome Dove, which I’m loving even while the length (800 more pages to go!) gives me the jitters
― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, 1 June 2023 15:04 (nine months ago) link
it's been 30 years since i read lonesome dove and the first thing i remember about it is that everybody wants a 'poke'
― mookieproof, Thursday, 1 June 2023 17:30 (nine months ago) link
last month was
stone blind - Medusa's story
women of Troy - modern retelling of life after the second fall of troy
two different translations of Seneca's version of the above
Stephen Fry's Troy, which is the story of troy up to the second sacking. which i enjoyed more than i thought i would given the writer. it's obviously a favourite subject of his.
this month (and probably next) is about 10 sf books from the todo list, all about 250 pages long, picked at random. first up, and the last one i bought, rendezvous with rama
― koogs, Thursday, 1 June 2023 19:12 (nine months ago) link
Local library is down to two Roths, counting Everyman, in their discards/donations shop--last one in the stacks: Exit Ghost. Are those good? Kind of attracted/repulsed by skimming, but more the former so far.
― dow, Thursday, 1 June 2023 19:21 (nine months ago) link
how was stone blind? i liked a thousand ships.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 1 June 2023 19:24 (nine months ago) link
Troy is Fry's 3rd book on the Greek myths preceded by Mytho9s and Heroes
― Stevo, Thursday, 1 June 2023 19:28 (nine months ago) link
yeah. i bought those 2 for a friend's kids and didn't like the chapter i read, hence my trepidation.
i wanted to like stone blind more than i did. for a book about Medusa she seemed very under used and it seemed more about Perseus than her. but then, given the facts, it has to be.
― koogs, Thursday, 1 June 2023 22:58 (nine months ago) link
Too many things at the same time again just added
Arlie Russell Hochschild The Managed HeartThe book that coined the term emotional labour. Study of effects of public contact jobs where one has to take jollity all the time.
Sara Ahmed the Feminist Killjoy HandbookNew book on how to be a feminist killjoy
Linda Nochlin Women ArtistsReader of her work
― Stevo, Friday, 2 June 2023 13:07 (nine months ago) link
I near the end of ROOM AT THE TOP. A very lively novel. I sense that for 50+ years it's been discussed routinely in terms of big ideas like class, sex, money, maybe the North - which are indeed basic to it, but the big words don't convey the quiddity of the novel. Braine was a better writer, more detailed and ambitious, than you might imagine. He conveys particular places and scenes. He shows feelings ebbing and flowing. When he writes of a fufilling sexual relationship, he heads for Lawrentian ground. He doesn't mind being intense.
I suspect that Braine never matched this novel, but it does have quality, not just as an emblem of an era. Indeed, as for the era: 1957, film a year or two later, it's thought of as a late-1950s text. But it's actually set in the 1940s - as early as 1946 or 1947. Attlee is in power, a businessman says 'Winnie was right, we're ruled by a Gestapo'. The protagonist has what would now be called a traumatic WWII past, in a POW camp and having seen his family's house razed by a bomb. Little of this, either, is well known in the public image of the book.
― the pinefox, Friday, 2 June 2023 20:04 (nine months ago) link
I'm here for every reference to Harriet the Spy.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 2 June 2023 20:43 (nine months ago) link
Local library is down to two Roths, counting Everyman, in their discards/donations shop--last one in the stacks: Exit Ghost. Are those good?
Everyman is extraordinary and Exit Ghost isn't bad in the horny-aging-writer genre. I loved those years when there was a Roth novella each year or so. Nemesis is the other great one, and The Humbling and Indignation are fine/worth reading.
― underwater as a compliment (Eazy), Friday, 2 June 2023 20:48 (nine months ago) link
I just finished the audiobook of The Ape's Wife and Other Stories, by Caitlin Kiernan. Highly entertaining reimaginings of well-worn tropes, as well as some more original ideas. The cast of readers is solid, including Bronson Pinchot, who is one of my favorites.
Just FYI, I got this and most of the other audiobooks I've been listening to from Chirp, which has the oddest assortment of titles I'd never ever consider but end up buying because they are priced like cutouts.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Friday, 2 June 2023 20:59 (nine months ago) link
Has anyone read The Dying Animal? It’s another of the late novellas. The plot line is so parodically horny-aging writer, I wonder in retrospect if it wasn’t a comedy and I missed the point entirely.
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 2 June 2023 22:19 (nine months ago) link
Thanks! I've already started reading Exit Ghost, which so far has room for some reading as comedy, which may or may not be deliberate, and I like that, also that it's npt overtly joeky. It is implicitly amusing to yours truly that the very accomplished novelist- narrator describes the way that several other (mostly male, all younger) characters have to have things just so, when he himself is that way, also as carefully described, of course!
At the same time, I'm a little put off by the way Roth himself has to set everything in place, especially with the rattling machinery of coincidence---but so far, he's a good enough yarnspinner to keep me going along.
― dow, Saturday, 3 June 2023 01:56 (nine months ago) link
And old Zuckerman needs to shut up a little with some of his oh-so-self-aware motivations--not shut up altogether, but some are more plausible than (more elaborately detailed) others---and as a lifer novelist, an observer and dealer in plausibility, he should be more wary of detailing motivations like cars, of being that kind of confident.
― dow, Saturday, 3 June 2023 02:06 (nine months ago) link
But that can turn out to be part of Roth's leaving room for reading as good comedy. Not there yet, but we'll soon see, I hope (yeah, it is a novella, or close to it).
― dow, Saturday, 3 June 2023 02:09 (nine months ago) link
And thinking back on it just a little more, I see I'm being somewhat unfair to Z. and his creator: whatever his actual range of reasons for a decade of self-imposed isolation in the boondocks, it is entirely plausible that he (specifically) comes back to NYC, now recently post-9/11, to get an operation because he's tired of peeing so much, and he the proud artistic monad now wants to be like and with everybody--he almost lets himself put it in just those terms---also, more generally, despite having triumphed over loneliness for years, still enjoying the memory of that he's just fallen off the wagon, lost his "sobriety" of solitude---and, motivations aside, he's watching himself make wtf impulsive decisions, more and more.
― dow, Saturday, 3 June 2023 02:36 (nine months ago) link
I guess this is a spoiler regarding American Pastoral, so
the moment where Zuckerman finally reaches his daughter Merry in a tenement in New Jersey, and learns that she has been responsible for bombings resulting in many deaths, and sees that she has decided to starve herself to death as a Jain in atonement, is powerful
I could be getting this wrong, it's been years since I've read it, but that is my memory of it
― Dan S, Sunday, 4 June 2023 00:16 (nine months ago) link
I finished Rachel Heng's The Great Reclamation, about the history of Singapore under British colonial rule and the Japanese invasion in WWII, about its quest for independence and the dredging of sand and reclamation of land around its shores. It centers on a single family.
I skipped Le Carre's first two novellas and have started in chronological order, reading The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965), and am planning to read A Small Town In Germany (1968) and The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) before resuming the Smiley novels
― Dan S, Sunday, 4 June 2023 00:44 (nine months ago) link
I am tempted by The Honourable Schoolboy
― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, 4 June 2023 12:38 (nine months ago) link
I will do you the courtesy of not posting to ilx quoted out of context
― michel goindry (wins), Sunday, 4 June 2023 12:54 (nine months ago) link
I finished Alan Hollinghurst's *The Line of Beauty*. It took me a week and it was an absolute pleasure to be part of.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Sunday, 4 June 2023 19:10 (nine months ago) link
'To be a part of' is a weird construction but absolutely fits the novel's Jamesian palpable present-intimate feel. It's an astonishing feat of close writing.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Sunday, 4 June 2023 19:13 (nine months ago) link
fwiw le Carré's first two novels are, I'll have said here before, a delight - I wouldn't skip them!
― the pinefox, Sunday, 4 June 2023 19:27 (nine months ago) link
The Line of Beauty, thought Chinaski as he gazed back across the garden at dusk, was something rather intimate. He found himself feeling almost sentimental, like the mother of the bride in a country town on a summer evening, as he realised how astonished he was to have been part of something so palpably, closely present.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 4 June 2023 19:30 (nine months ago) link
Well put, Chinaski
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 4 June 2023 19:43 (nine months ago) link
Hehehe. Nicely done, pinefox. Cheers Alfred.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Sunday, 4 June 2023 19:50 (nine months ago) link
I finish ROOM AT THE TOP. Thinking about varieties of 'realism' and how this novel is a kind of exemplar of a 'return to' such, I remark that it has diversity of voice, point of view, mode - with sections of fantasy (like BILLY LIAR you could say), extrapolation, pastiches of official discourse dreamed up by the narrator, moments of 'out of body experience' where he refers to himself in the 3rd person; not to mention the altered states of drunkenness and passion. A good instance of the nuance and complexity of fictional modes that are readily thought simple and unitary from a distance.
I said that the fact that the novel is set in the 1940s hadn't been much noticed. Actually one critic, Dominic Head, does point it out, noting that the novel is narrated from 10 years later - so it's a late-1950s POV on a 1940s life. Technically that's from a Conservative era to a Labour one, and in this particular instance this needn't be quite an incidental link. The later era is "you've never had it so good" time, and the character's earlier passion for life has been lost.
I return to Sean O'Casey's 1933 play WITHIN THE GATES. It's four acts, rather overlong, each act (or 'scene') showing one seasonal moment in a city park. A range of characters often without proper names come and go. A Bishop, a couple of atheist orators, an engaging young Yeatsian poet, a beautiful, passionate but physically ailing young woman. I don't think the balance in this play is quite right, or that a central action is particularly visible amid the melée. A flaw, I find, is O'Casey's very bad rendition of phonetic English (especially working-class) voices. I believe that O'Casey lived in England by this time, which must have emboldened this approach.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 4 June 2023 20:30 (nine months ago) link
I've only seen the movie of Room At The Top, long ago, but yeah it left a lingering sense of England still marked by the War, finding ways through that, and he meets a fellow veteran of a certain campaign, who was an officer, now condescending to this member of the lower class/
Finished Exit Ghost, which was good enough to be frustrating: I would be following Zuckerman,back and forth, tolerant of his handheld camera/baseball catcher's mask (there's usually a sense of a grid, of wires in the view, but ok; he turns the camera on himself, effectively enough at times), then one of the other characters would get into close-range deposition, spilling their guts in response to his nosy questions---he's the great novelist Zuckerman, and he wants to know! Speaking of xpost rattling machinery: some of this seems good, but there's so much of it---and this is the "real" talk, interspersed with Z.'s increasingly long-ass compulsive fantasy scripting of dialogue with the fabulous WASP literary aspirant, from the loveliest old oil money neighborhood in Houston, which Roth seems to know something about, along with a lot of other things that could have come across a lot better in third-person narration, with characters not having to explain themselves to Zuckerman, which also tends to make good scenes go on too long, as the yadda-yadda format becomes distracting.
(Also he sticks in this long thing about George Plimpton, who may have died while the book was being written, as happens in the book.)(This while some other promising material is left to become merely anecdotal, although pretty good for that.) I found Nemesis, which I think is all third person, and looks like there aren't any writers in it, as far as I've skimmed. Will also check Everyman; thanks again for the tip.
― dow, Sunday, 4 June 2023 20:48 (nine months ago) link
Jenny by Sigrid Undset (1911). A young independent female painter falls in love... one of those books where I would dearly love to know the thoughts of the author, intentional fallacy be damned. Jenny gets mansplained at by a friend who thinks the most important thing is work (artistic, or otherwise intellectually fulfilling) but all women eventually - given the chance - give it up for the sake of a man. Women are 'completely devoid of self esteem', 'Woman has no soul', 'You admit more or less openly that love affairs are the only thing that interest you'. We don't really hear Jenny's side - 'She thought he was right in some things and wrong in others, but she was not inclined to discuss them' - I don't blame her! But she does seems to agree with his basic idea - 'But that is how we are made - all of us'. One of her friends, also a painter, has just given it up completely for a man and a life of housework. We do hear of a man, her fiance's father, who gave up his dreams of being an artist for the sake of marriage, and a loveless one at that. But he has a job, the housework is 100% his wife's responsibility - and she resents it, but the idea that these things should be shared more equally has not come up. Clearly these women, independent and artistic at the beginning, seem doomed to become the prisoners of their patriarchal society, while the men claim it's all down to biology. I'd just like to know how clearly Undset herself saw things.
― ledge, Monday, 5 June 2023 08:45 (nine months ago) link
been meaning to update the thread properly, but i’ve just picked up the blazing world by jonathan healey, as pre-bedtime break from solonoid and wtf is going on with this dude’s style. after an enjoyable boost seeing “enormity” used uh.. “correctly” on the first page, i began to realise that there is something terribly wrong with his style, which is clipped to the point of being ungrammatical, producing crippled sentences like“But it was also fragile and thoroughly traditional. *A place still dominated by the land and turn if the seasons*”that’s not a sentence my man. i don’t care much about And and But starting sentences, but their proliferation makes for some seriously choppy progress down the page. “Population was growing, but the economy wasn’t developing in such a way to cope, leading to a serious poverty problem …”what in blazes is going on here. the vanished “the” before population throws me into a mock barnsley accent, emphasised by “the economy” shortly after. but lest you dwell too long on that you’re dealing with “but the economy wasn’t developing in such a way to cope” (visions of the economy wailing “i can’t cope!”). better *if* you’re going to do this to have “but the economy couldn’t cope” maybe, but do economies *cope*? you need an implied mechanism there. cope *with what*? “cope with the rising demand for food or requirement for people to make a living” maybe. then the coup de grace — “leading to a serious poverty problem.” see what you’ve got here mate, you’ve got a serious poverty problem. maybe try “leading to widespread poverty”? perhaps? poverty *is* a problem. goddam fucker sounds like mealy mouthed corporate politician. that is all. had to get it off my chest. hope it’s just the introduction. feels horribly deliberate. like he’s trying to capture history as a news bulletin. it sounds like he’s writing via a telegraph communication.
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 21:17 (nine months ago) link
“towns were reborn as social hubs”towns were not reborn as social hubs.
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 21:19 (nine months ago) link
I think that the rule (if it's a rule) that you mustn't start a sentence with 'But' is a bad rule.
It is actively useful and helpful to logical argument and clarity to start sentences with 'But', and correspondingly unhelpful to be forbidden from doing so.
Terry Eagleton, as I recall, has long flouted that rule, which will have had an influence on my sense of these things, since my teens.
Starting a sentence with 'And' I feel is a somewhat different matter, less helpful and probably lacking elegance, but I still wouldn't ban it.
― the pinefox, Monday, 5 June 2023 21:45 (nine months ago) link
"the economy wasn’t developing in such a way to cope"
Good critique of this. Isn't it actually missing "as"? Needs to be: "the economy wasn’t developing in such a way as to cope". Otherwise it's meaningless.
― the pinefox, Monday, 5 June 2023 21:47 (nine months ago) link
"The country's population was growing, but its wealth was not, and poverty per head thus steadily increased."
How about that?
― the pinefox, Monday, 5 June 2023 21:48 (nine months ago) link
I think that the rule (if it's a rule) that you mustn't start a sentence with 'But' is a bad rule.It is actively useful and helpful to logical argument and clarity to start sentences with 'But', and correspondingly unhelpful to be forbidden from doing so.Terry Eagleton, as I recall, has long flouted that rule, which will have had an influence on my sense of these things, since my teens.Starting a sentence with 'And' I feel is a somewhat different matter, less helpful and probably lacking elegance, but I still wouldn't ban it.
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:00 (nine months ago) link
Do you mean 'And'?
Does your last point mean: don't make it two separate sentences but one long sentence with 'and' in it?
― the pinefox, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:02 (nine months ago) link
A watershed had been reached in 1588−9, when a pamphlet war exploded in which scabrous publications under the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate (‘Martin Bash-bishop’) made noisy calls for the abolition of the episcopacy.now it’s been a while since i’ve read any of the MM tracts but - feel like i’m going slightly mad here - “Marprelate” does not carry any of the insinuation that “bash-bishop” does, right? i mean my immediate response was excruciated laughter, but then i’m not a 17th century expert, so maybe it’s… intended?
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:06 (nine months ago) link
Do you mean 'And'?Does your last point mean: don't make it two separate sentences but one long sentence with 'and' in it?
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:08 (nine months ago) link
“why are you reading this, fizzles?”anton howes, who i think is pretty good, mentioned it approvingly.
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:10 (nine months ago) link
I think you're neglecting the consideration that on your model, sentences could become very long, and on mine they could become shorter and more manageable.
There is a place for long sentences when necessary, but in general I think one should be aiming to minimise, not maximise length.
― the pinefox, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:12 (nine months ago) link
Thinking of the tonal difference that I intuitively feel between 'But' and And' here, I find myself thinking that 'And' can feel journalistic.
MANCHESTER UNITED boss Eric Ten Hag is planning a sensational swoop for England captain Harry Kane.And Old Trafford chiefs have promised the Dutchman a sizeable war chest to land his target.
And Old Trafford chiefs have promised the Dutchman a sizeable war chest to land his target.
― the pinefox, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:15 (nine months ago) link
Whereas 'But' to my mind can usually be used for the purpose of relatively elegant logical development.
Baudelaire, to be sure, was a romantic, a poet of the halo and the swan, who might have been at home in one of Byron's narratives. But he was also a realist, an urban analyst who was the contemporary of Marx and the early Flaubert.
― the pinefox, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:20 (nine months ago) link
my model, such as it is, is vary short and long sentences. this writer’s model, such as it is, is fire sentences at you as from a mitrailleuse.
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:21 (nine months ago) link
you’re pushing at an open door. i don’t know how many times i have to say i’m not against using and or but as sentence openers. just don’t overdo it.
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:22 (nine months ago) link
― the pinefox, Sunday, June 4, 2023
ok, I will circle back to them!
― Dan S, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:38 (nine months ago) link
just got a fit of the giggles thinking about the phrase “i’m going mar my prelate”. i’m supposed to be asleep ffs. early start. also “fear about witchcraft was at its height”. “fear *of* witchcraft”. i’m being picky, sure, (not on bishop basher - that’s egregious), but it’s v choppy. choppy and hamfisted. damn thing reads like a work email.
― Fizzles, Monday, 5 June 2023 22:43 (nine months ago) link
And/But he's got you reading and writing and thinking and writing some more about it. What more could a writer want, aside from money?
yo pinefox, this is even better:
Baudelaire, to be sure, was a romantic, a poet of the halo and the swan, who might have been at home in one of Byron's narratives. But (H)e was also a realist, an urban analyst who was the contemporary of Marx and the early Flaubert.
― dow, Tuesday, 6 June 2023 03:35 (nine months ago) link
Damn!
― dow, Tuesday, 6 June 2023 03:40 (nine months ago) link
Dow: I don't agree that your version is an improvement. I think it's an alteration, fine in itself but with a slightly different meaning from what I wrote.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 6 June 2023 08:05 (nine months ago) link
Dow was an ILX poster. But he was also resistant to some aspects of the Internet.
Dow was an ILX poster. He was also resistant to some aspects of the Internet.
Both valid statements, but not the same.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 6 June 2023 08:07 (nine months ago) link
I've started Sean O'Casey's 1942 play RED ROSES FOR ME.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 6 June 2023 08:08 (nine months ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nu6aGcDeAg
― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 6 June 2023 10:28 (nine months ago) link
Silvia Federici Caliban and the WitchSo far I've only reached the end of the first chapter. Interesting to read about discrepancies between how feudalism etc are taught and some of the reality. Like how much push back peasants had against their landlords supposed masters. I think things are somewhat simplified in school history :-) so interesting to see the version presented here.I think this is something I have been meaning to read for a while. I have just recently listened to the Books On Fire series on the book which was interesting. They have a current series on the Dawn of Everything which I also need to read as I think I need to read the rest of Graeber.
How Europ0e Underdeveloped Africa Walter Rodneyhis book on imbalance between continents and how the once advanced area of Africa got robbed and backburnered and colonised and all those shit things.I just read a couple of paragraphs describing the arrival of my dad's tribe in East Africa from further North which si much later than I'd assumed. He's saying 16th century, not sure when I'd assumed but could have been as much as a thousand years earlier so I really need to read a history of the tribe.
Sara Ahmed The Feminist Killjoy's HandbookAustralian author looks into the stereotype that's associated with feminism and explores what positive could be morphed out of that. Very interesting book. I need to read more of her work, I read Living A Feminist Life a couple of years ago.
How To Read A Suit Lydia EdwardsThe development of men's formal attire since the invention of the suit in the late 17th century, I think up to the end of the 20th.A book I think I need a copy of that isn't borrowed from the library. Especially with there only being one copy in the system and at least one person waiting to get hold of this after me.Great book anyway, got some nice photos of clothing and breakdown of the elements thereof.I think I'm also going to need to read her initial book in this miniseries How To Read A Dress. Think I need to be able to salivate over the pair of these books at my leisure though. & see what I can incorporate into my own designs.
― Stevo, Tuesday, 6 June 2023 11:59 (nine months ago) link
hell yes
― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Tuesday, 6 June 2023 13:20 (nine months ago) link
with a slightly different meaning from what I wrote.
― dow, Wednesday, 7 June 2023 03:01 (nine months ago) link
J Edgar, do you know the play? That's interesting.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 7 June 2023 05:13 (nine months ago) link
Dow: roughly, yes. Just as it would be if 'but' appeared in the middle of a sentence rather than at the start of a second sentence.
Finished Valis by PKD. I'm not sure I've had my perception of a book turn on a dime so quickly - I disliked the first half, enjoyed it much more after the movie was introduced. Let's just say I feel for this guy's (five) ex-wives.
Started reading Sergio Pitol's The Love Parade based on xyzzzz's recommendation in the Winter thread. I'm only 10 pages in but the writing is so elegant and I'm loving it so far.
― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, 7 June 2023 11:06 (nine months ago) link
I haven't looked at O'Casey since I was too young to understand him but my stepdad was a communist committed to the cause of a free Ireland -- I would try to read him & Behan & all the other stuff on the shelves, fancying myself very erudite & worldly. these sorts of biting-off-more-than-I-could-reasonably-chew moments in my development as a reader were pretty crucial for me
― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Wednesday, 7 June 2023 14:01 (nine months ago) link
― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, 7 June 2023 bookmarkflaglink
ILB poster Tim H has gifted me a copy of his book of short stories. Will let you all know how that is in a month or so.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 7 June 2023 14:27 (nine months ago) link
I listened to a podcast on Theodore Allen's The Invention Of The White Race earlier. A book I tried reading as a bog book last year but gave up om because I couldn't work out how to deal with the copious amount of endnotes which had link numbers peppering the text heavily. &it was actually important significant notes not just citations. So I either had to go and check them at around the time I passed the number or catch up on a few at the end of a page or something. Just not sure how you keep the flow going and you do need the background info.I'm finding reading Caliban and The Witch very similar, not sure why I didn't mention that yesterday. Like great book I really need/want to read but need to navigate this almost every paragraph.Do I just need to read the book about twice once for sense and again for the context for the notes.
― Stevo, Friday, 9 June 2023 23:06 (nine months ago) link
what is a bog book?
― mookieproof, Friday, 9 June 2023 23:14 (nine months ago) link
I am determined to get through War and Peace. I have to keep referring to the wikipedia page to remember all of the proper names, nicknames, alternate names, bestowed names and childhood names of each of the characters. It's very confounding but it's worth it
The war scenes get me down, but the intimate scenes between members of the 5 families and their relatives and friends and lovers make me want to continue
― Dan S, Friday, 9 June 2023 23:57 (nine months ago) link
― CeeLô Borges (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 10 June 2023 00:11 (nine months ago) link
j/kI believe it is what we might call in the US a Bathroom Book
― CeeLô Borges (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 10 June 2023 00:12 (nine months ago) link
I bought War and Peace new for $2.99 and it sat unread for at least a decade before I opened it. I found the experience of reading it engrossing even as I knew I wasn't retaining any more than 0.1% of it.Bondarchuk's films are an excellent adaptation, even the philosophical bits, a lot better than the middlebrow synopsis I feared.
― Halfway there but for you, Saturday, 10 June 2023 01:41 (nine months ago) link
I'm currently reading "The Triumph of Christianity" by Bart Ehrman. Perhaps a bit repetitive and you feel like he is making an effort to spell things out carefully and clearly for a lay audience, but still I'm learning some new things about the first few centuries of Christianity and the Roman empire.
― o. nate, Saturday, 10 June 2023 02:26 (nine months ago) link
i read like two-thirds of war and peace last summer and it was fantastic but then i just . . . wanted to read something else
the good characters are *so* good and i love them but they have such flights of certainty like 'this is what i was meant to do all along!' and it's awkward because they're almost always wrong
― mookieproof, Saturday, 10 June 2023 04:14 (nine months ago) link
Bog book is one to read on bog. So short periods of time and probably not full concentration. So totally wrong for some books particularly if they need you to keep looking at several paragraph long endnotes.Endnotes denote scholarship and research not directly placed in narrative flow of main text. So both books mentioned massively researched. So need to be read with more concentration than some others and presumably need time dedicates specifically to them.
Bog= loo = jacks Which is thankfully not shared so I can read without external interruption.
But some books just don't lend themselves as easily to some environments. I think both books I mentioned are widely read so somebody must have found a good way around continually stopping and starting their narrative flow. It really is at least one endnote number per paragraph, sometimes 2 or 3. In the Federici at least. I've yet to het back to Theodore Allen which I'm still planning to do.
Presumably must be a few other books with a similar endnote or end of chapter note set up. That people do overcome. Just seems like you do need to juggle trying to keep up with endnotes and flow of text or do people just get 2 copies so they can have notes open at same time as text?
― Stevo, Saturday, 10 June 2023 06:44 (nine months ago) link
Caliban is the one to read by Federici— I would just read through, Stevo. I have not been reading with any concentration or energy, unfortunately, tho have finished a few books in the past month. The summer break often leaves me quite cash poor so I will have ample time to get to the piles that have accumulated over the school year. I am most looking forward to reading a few novels that have been sitting, as well as diving into William Carlos Williams’ ‘Paterson,’ which I have never read, somehow.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Saturday, 10 June 2023 13:26 (nine months ago) link
Nabokov - Speak, Memory. A memoir of his covering childhood, family, Russia, revolution, exile in Europe then stopping before he moves to the US. It's fine, lots of fine phrases and sentences. But its also quite boring, the man had these tastes for art that were kind of monotonous, his politics were boring liberal gruel. The one thing I liked a bit more was when he discovered his love of butterflies. But you also know that, were he to explore thi topic in several chapters it would be very taxonomy-heavy, he would kill the interest with unrelenting detail.
No exuberance here, none of Proust's wild flights. No love.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 10 June 2023 13:44 (nine months ago) link
I finished the Natalia Ginzburg book, which maintained its course to the end, but its interest diffused for me as the characters' lives (all of them real people) diverged from Ginzburg's life and the details became more sparse or distantly observed. I'm happy to have read it, but was happy to lay it aside by the end.
After this I read Jar City, a detective fiction by an Icelandic author, Arnaldur Indridason. It fulfilled all the requirements of the genre and was entirely satisfactory, even a bit ambitious and venturesome, but nothing that would challenge any of the conventions its readers would expect it to deliver.
I'm leaning toward my next book being a re-read but haven't settled on anything yet.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, 10 June 2023 18:32 (nine months ago) link
I liked Jar City fine but at some point soon after maxed out on Skandinavischen Krimis.
― CeeLô Borges (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 10 June 2023 19:40 (nine months ago) link
Finished Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book after nearly a month’s effort of reading it only as I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. It is a novel without human characters, a book about nature composed entirely of purloined and rearranged descriptions of nature from other books. It took Comitta about nine years to write, and it shows— it’s a deft and dense book in the Oulipian tradition that I truly enjoyed.
― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Sunday, 11 June 2023 18:20 (nine months ago) link
Keith Ridgway - A Shock.
As we finish Spring I am reading a book by a living writer. I found him through twitter (Keith is from Dublin but lives in London, and actually South London, which I'm delighted about as this is my part of town and what I know).
'A Shock', then, is a series of interconnected stories of people living their lives in this part of London. They are drinking, living in with housemates, writing emails and texts, having sex, thinking thoughts, reading, working, talking about all sorts, and trying to live as best they are able. Bizarre to read a book that speaks to personally specific experiences. It's all just really well done.
Great book to start the summer.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 11 June 2023 20:49 (nine months ago) link
Ginzburg was my Great 2021 Discovery, thanks to NROB. I don't know which novel you read, Aimless, but I suggest giving Happiness, As Such and Valentino a try.
xyzz -- I also didn't care for Speak, Memory.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 11 June 2023 21:05 (nine months ago) link
I read *Hawthorn and Child* by Keith Ridgway about a decade ago and loved it. I've lost a lot of the detail but remember it was a detective novel that was more elision than plot and very emotionally affecting. There's a running theme associated with the Formula One driver Tom Pryce that has 100% stayed with me. It was a lot like Gordon Burn iirr. Good stuff.
I finished James Woods' *How Fiction Works*. Woods knows his subject inside out clearly and is a good close reader but trying to write a short and 'popular' work of literary criticism is a hell of a task to set oneself.
I enjoyed the range of references, the early chapters on (broadly) the history of the novel, the aforementioned close reading - particularly the stuff on Balzac, Woolf & Lawrence. There's a bit where he compares four 'fire' metaphors (from Hardy, Bellow, Lawrence and Norman Rush) and I would have loved more of the same.
What I struggled with: the book is organised into 123 paragraphs and these fall into what feels like a random selection of chapters: Flaubert gets two; the others are a loose confection of 'Detail' 'Language' & things like 'Truth, Convention & Realism' - all of which gives the feeling of Wood eventually asking the publisher 'will this do?'.
― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Sunday, 11 June 2023 21:14 (nine months ago) link
I loved War & Peace so much that I'm reading Karenina now
― J Edgar Noothgrush (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Sunday, 11 June 2023 22:12 (nine months ago) link
it's really good. i should read it again. i never read war and peace. my mother raves about it. as others do, i've heard
― Tracer Hand, Sunday, 11 June 2023 22:15 (nine months ago) link
I’ve gotten about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through War and Peace. The war scenes in Schöngrabern and Austerlitz so far are somewhat interesting. Pierre Bezukhov, who I guess is the protagonist, seems like a drip to me. I've been liking the story of Nikolai Rostov. He is a hussar and the beloved eldest son on the Rostov family. He comes home from war and his 15 year old cousin Sonya Rostova is in love with him, and Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov, who is his "friend" - and who is cold and psychopathic - ruins Rostov by luring him into an outrageous debt in a card game that is fixed, in revenge after Dolokhov is rejected by Sonya in a proposal of marriage
― Dan S, Monday, 12 June 2023 01:52 (nine months ago) link
you are completely wrong
― mookieproof, Monday, 12 June 2023 02:39 (nine months ago) link
always good to know
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 12 June 2023 02:40 (nine months ago) link
This is embarrassing. I just realized I've been thinking Michael Wood and James Wood are the same person. Who'd have thought there would be 2 English literary critics with such similar names.
In other news, I just finished "Triumph of Christianity" by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is balanced and humble, which is a good trait in a historian dealing with controversial topics for which the historical record is limited. He seems to provide a good overview of where the scholarship is, although perhaps for a topic like this, a dash of unrestrained speculation would not always be unwelcome. I think it would perhaps take a different and more speculative book, and one more focused on human psychology, to provide a satisfying answer to the question of how Christianity grew so quickly and so steadily for so many years.
Now I'm reading a biography of William James by Robert Richardson.
― o. nate, Monday, 12 June 2023 02:42 (nine months ago) link
Reading The Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington, about UFOs. So far pretty much a potted history of the subject and the major sightings, pushing the idea that most or all of the more extraordinary ones were deliberate fakes by the cia or the nsa or the air force or the navy, either to confuse and misdirect the soviets, or one of the other rival agencies, or the american public - the motivations or purposes aren't entirely clear and it seems a little weird that these agencies would spend so much time and money on what seems like, basically, a lot of dicking around - but probably less weird than the other explanation: not so much that we've been visited, but that the visitors themselves enjoy a good deal of dicking around.
― ledge, Monday, 12 June 2023 08:37 (nine months ago) link
o.nate: MW was born 1936, I think 1965. A similarity is that they both migrated to the US and became rather transatlantic figures.
They are both talented and knowledgeable, but MW has greater range including film and more philosophy. MW is much funnier and defter than JW, who has a more moralising or solemn aspect.
― the pinefox, Monday, 12 June 2023 09:06 (nine months ago) link
* should have said: JW 1965.
That is interesting about UFOs.
I finish Sean O'Casey's RED ROSES FOR ME (1942). I like it more than WITHIN THE GATES. It describes the build-up to a strike ('sthrike') and battle with police. I had thought maybe this was about the 1913 lockout, but it doesn't really seem to be. At one point it seems like it might be about the 1916 Rising, but it can't be. I think rather it's a more generalised idea of insurrection. Some of this is labour-based, as you would expect from O'Casey, but the rhetoric also becomes very nationalist and republican. Ultimately it's oddly like an inversion of eg THE PLOUGH & THE STARS where insurrection is criticised. Here it's heroic, the one thing you don't expect from O'Casey!
A good deal of the play also involves infighting and / or cooperation between Catholics and Protestants. There is also a quite appealing scene by the Liffey where the colours of sunset transfigure people and Dublin becomes a momentary utopia dreaming of a better future.
― the pinefox, Monday, 12 June 2023 09:10 (nine months ago) link
War and Peace was one of my first projects when the pandemic started -- took a week to finish. Tolstoy's one of the few writers who can switch from the cosmic in one paragraph to capturing a human nuance in another.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 12 June 2023 09:16 (nine months ago) link
one other thing about the mirage men, i hope i'm not losing it but i find the multitude of names near impossible to follow. e.g. we hear about a sighting by pilot kenneth arnold, who gets employed by sf magazine editor ray palmer to investigate more sightings, in particular one by harold dahl, who tells his story to fred crisman, arnold then gets visited by two air force agents, frank brown and william davidson, decides to call in the help of another pilot e.j. smith... after a few pages of this, when they're all reduced to surnames only, i'm reeling. plus all the acronyms of security agencies and ufo groups, as well as the usual there's atic, apro, csi, afosi, dia...
― ledge, Monday, 12 June 2023 09:27 (nine months ago) link
it seems a little weird that these agencies would spend so much time and money on what seems like, basically, a lot of dicking around
I dunno, much of the history of the CIA in the 20th century seemed to be dicking around - financing abstract art, trying to off Castro with an exploding cigar, etc.
― Daniel_Rf, Monday, 12 June 2023 09:46 (nine months ago) link
yes coppola's heart of darkness quote springs to mind, adding in 'too few morals' for good measure.
― ledge, Monday, 12 June 2023 09:52 (nine months ago) link
heart of darkness lol, apocalypse now ofc
― ledge, Monday, 12 June 2023 09:57 (nine months ago) link
Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, like your average Le Carré novel, shows 40 years of dicking around.
― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 12 June 2023 10:08 (nine months ago) link
what if a mole but outer space
― mark s, Monday, 12 June 2023 11:17 (nine months ago) link
I Am Not Ashamed, the lurid, ghostwritten tell-all by troubled 50s actress Barbara Payton. Accidentally reads like a rare mid-century noir written from a female POV.
― Chris L, Monday, 12 June 2023 17:31 (nine months ago) link
― Fizzles, Monday, 12 June 2023 17:38 (nine months ago) link
Who was the ghost?
― dow, Monday, 12 June 2023 18:26 (nine months ago) link
Maybe it wasn't accidental, to have that kind of pulp appeal.
― dow, Monday, 12 June 2023 18:27 (nine months ago) link
time to catch up on my recent and no not-so-recent reading:
Into the Woods and The Likeness – Tana French
The first two volumes in the Dublin Murder Squad series. Although, as French says in the acknowledgments to the second novel, 'In some places, where the story seemed to require it, I’ve taken liberties with facts (Ireland doesn’t, for example, have a Murder squad)'. Yes, yes, i think it's fair to say that's taking a bit of a liberty, Tana.
These are enjoyable, in fact compelling, to an extent that slightly surprised me. There is in both, but especially the latter, a central near-supernatural element that unravels the minds of the individual detectives, so that they are doing battle not just with a crime and its causes but with their perception of the crime and its scene, of their place in it, of their potential contribution to its causes. They are *implicated*. Their heads get fucked. It puts you on edge as a reader. It's effective.
French manages dialogue and scene building very well indeed. It was a touch and go thing with the initial introductory paragraphs of both, which are quite mannered, but that's got past almost immediately. Apart from a truly dreadful concluding 'action' scene in *The Likeness*, the writing is very accomplished and impressive.
I haven't read the others in the series, apparently not as good, but I might give at least one of them a go.
― Fizzles, Monday, 12 June 2023 18:30 (nine months ago) link
xxp gossip columnist/pulp writer Leo Guild. I meant "accidental" more as a tell-all so vivid that it crosses over into the world of pulp/noir.
― Chris L, Monday, 12 June 2023 18:45 (nine months ago) link
Essays:
The Frontiers of Meaning, Three Informal Lectures on Music – Charles RosenAlmost magical essay construction and writing. Compare it to the broken footed english civil war history i quote above itt - the quality of the writing is connected to the quality of the thought, or its expression anyway. Poor style cripples difficult or complicated expression and thinking. Charles Rosen's essays are almost delicate in the selection of their elements, the examples, the points of argument, but retain throughout a good humour, resilient and appropriate to talking about art and the attendant arguments and difficulties over differences in taste and performance. As I'm not a musicologist (although can read music), the light but very clear deployment of musical analysis and reading of scores was much appreciated.
The second of these for instance, How to Become Immortal, describe the process by which reputation is constructed from the initial cultural experience of eg Beethoven, and turned over time to Immortality. Rosen's central contention is that 'canonic status is accorded to works not by posterity, or at least not by a posterity as distant in time as is sometimes thought'. He shows why he thinks that and the mechanisms and cultural processes by which immortality is constructed.
The first, The Frontiers of Nonsense, describes the process of initially resisting that which we do not understand, that friction ultimately driving us to try and understand and ultimately love - what are the boundaries of this process.
These are sophisticated essays, light and substantial at the same time, with clear musicological examples and full of anecdote, historical knowledge, and insight. They're also amusing, with pithy aperçus (a phrase that i want to spoonerise immediately now i've written it) and anecdotes:
...Charles Lamb, who in 1821, six years before Beethoven's death, wrote an essay against the appreciation of music entitled "A Chapter on Ears." He has, he says, no ear for music: ".. *sentimentally* I am disposed to harmony. But *organically* I am incapable of a tune." Operas and oratorios are bad enough, he remarks, but even worse are "those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called..." Listening to pure instrumental music for Lamb ("empty instrumental music," as he terms it) was like reading a book that was all punctuation...
or the wise
... we have trouble enough revising our own standards of criticism without having to pretend to reform everyone else's.
Second, the essay Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective, collected in the book of the same name, by Clifford Geertz. Not the first time I've read this, it's an extraordinary essay on how the management of the 'place of fact in a world of judgment' in western jurisprudence is constituted with regard to قّ / ḥaqq, dharma, and adat in other cultures. I think what I admire most about Geertz is the flexibility of his intelligence to manage questions of relation in a framework that allows comparison. To recognise that sometimes you are going to have to manage matters pragmatically, but that you have to retain an ability to distinguish and to relate. As with Rosen, his deep, deep knowledge allows firmness of opinion where it is due, and a relaxed approach to differences of opinion where any such dogma is unhelpful or inappropriate to assert.
It's an essay that would be in my own personal canonical reading list, and perhaps i ought to try and do better justice to it elsewhere. but as with many geertz essays - and i'm no anthropologist and i'm sure he's been superseded or contradicted by mightier authorities - but you feel like you're getting the literary equivalent of that intelligence chip musk wants to put in people's branes (i might be summarising frivolously ofc). Free intelligence, right here, anyway. And again, the quality of the thought, and its expression, is invigorating to read.
― Fizzles, Monday, 12 June 2023 18:57 (nine months ago) link
Vehicle – Jen Calleja. I really liked her collection of short stories, I'm afraid that's all we've got time for. Man, I struggled with this. I am delighted that it exists though, and I love the fact that prototype publishing is putting this sort of thing out.
It is not, as the subtitle states, a verse novel. It is, I guess a work of metafiction. And again, the theory is quite enticing, a wandering set of islands, colonised by our european nations, suffer a schism from the Mainland colonisers. A group of academics and writers are paid to recover the history of the schism and its aftermath from the fragments of texts and recordings that remain, only to find this is a political attempt at erasure of history. the substance of the texts are centred around the people and events that orbit around the punk/post-punk group Vehicle. Translation, xenophobia, immigration are the themes.
By fuck it's heavy going. I feel bad because I was going through a period of struggling to read and it's more than possible that i just didn't have the energy or mental sharpness to tackle this book – if any ilxor can rescue it for me I'd be delighted because I really wanted it to work. Didn't finish, I'm afraid.
― Fizzles, Monday, 12 June 2023 19:04 (nine months ago) link
more tomorrow to avoid DoS-ing the books thread.
― Fizzles, Monday, 12 June 2023 19:07 (nine months ago) link
one more
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession – Janet Malcolm.
Sharp, well written, but her tame psychoanalyst is frequently quite annoying... "At our next meeting, I confessed to Aaron that I sometimes got tired of hearing him talk..." No. shit. is what i have to say to that. The book describes the jealousies and organisational politics – and disputes over theories of transference – of New York/US psychoanalysis of the period through the eyes and mouth of a self-pitying, somewhat pooterish psychoanalyst. the focus is very narrow and although that should be its great weakness it's actually probably its strength, as a documentary of the subject and period. It's like a short film or feature piece, unsurprisingly maybe. Malcolm is a very sharp writer. odd little book though.
― Fizzles, Monday, 12 June 2023 20:49 (nine months ago) link
I commence rereading Sean O'Casey's early play JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK (1924). It's shorter and feels more vivid and immediate than the later plays I've mentioned above. Some of the broad humour also comes through OK on the page.
― the pinefox, Monday, 12 June 2023 22:09 (nine months ago) link
I've been reading in Some Trick, a book of short stories by Helen DeWitt, presumably early work of hers that was published after Last Samurai in order to take advantage of the surge in interest. It has that feel to it. They're pretty interesting and her talent is obvious, but they're not mature work.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 12 June 2023 22:30 (nine months ago) link
Just finished Geoff Dyer's The Last Days of Roger Federer which was a fun early summer read - hits all the usual Dyer notes (Tennis, Burning Man, jazz, living in Brixton in the mid-80s etc) in a way that worked for me.
Picked up Knausgaard's The Morning Star for £1.50 in a charity shop yesterday. Tempted to dive in (I read, and enjoyed, the first six and a half volumes of My Struggle but just wondered if anyone on ILB had actually read it.
― bain4z, Tuesday, 13 June 2023 07:53 (nine months ago) link
i think some trick is a mixture tbh. imo a few of the stories are up there with her best - brutto for instance or entourage and the french style of mlle matsumoto. these have the recent v laconic style, and sit well with the sexual codes of the europeans and the english understand wool. the earlier ones are less successful (especially the one set in oxford - famous last words?, as are the rock music ones, which are just slightly off though still have key hdw elements.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 13 June 2023 07:59 (nine months ago) link
JUNO & THE PAYCOCK is perhaps O'Casey's most famous play. I read it long ago. I never thought I liked it that much but returning to it, I do find that it has a directness and comic effect that's better than the later work. Broad comedy in eg: the way that Boyle says he'll do one thing then immediately does another. Odd English middle-class character who's a Theosophist. The Civil War context perhaps doesn't come through so well - a character is shot, but there is never any sense of what people are fighting for.
I then started O'Casey's play COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY (1949). This is odd. It starts with an actor dressed as a cockerel walking across the stage. It seems to concern, in part, misogyny and distrust of women (that is, it seems to be critical of these things) - but I'm not far in yet.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 13 June 2023 14:06 (nine months ago) link
Hitchcock did an adaptation of Juno & The Paycock during the silent era.
― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 14 June 2023 09:29 (nine months ago) link
True. I should see that. I'm surprised John Ford never filmed it.
I pause the COCK play to read Flann O'Brien's short TV play THE BOY FROM BALLYTEARIM. Its historical setting (Boer War and WWI) is of interest, but the play is very slight. Oddly there's no real twist or action.
I then start rereading Flann O'Brien's early play FAUSTUS KELLY (1943), set in a regional council. Critics have always dismissed this play. But all the dialogue so far holds up well, including long speeches from Kelly that are hilarious pastiches of political discourse. I think it's been underrated.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 14 June 2023 09:54 (nine months ago) link
I go on to Flann's other substantial play RHAPSODY IN STEPHEN'S GREEN (1943). Three acts set in the park, in which insects and other animals talk. Social and political allegory. It's all quite entertaining and has some striking elements - such as the bees whose desire to sting, which will kill them, brings sex and death together in a way unusual in this writer. On the whole I think these plays have been underrated because his other work shortly before them had been so outstanding. They're better than his late work.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 15 June 2023 07:44 (nine months ago) link
Silvia Federici Caliban And The Witchvery interesting book looking at the develo9pment of capitalism and how it effected the working class and especially women who were seriously disenfranchised by the process It looks back at how feudalism was not the idyll it seems to be painted as in school history lessons and that there were actual means of protest at inequality and injustice etc. It also looks ta the rise of the witch hunt and who exactly got vilified.One problem I had with the text was the constant ping pong one had to play between the text's narrative flow and turning to the end of the chapter where the endnotes are. These are often pretty substantial, which while showing a great deal of research also seriously disturbs the narrative flow. So it takes a bit longer to read than a book with less notes or where all the reference numbers are to citations not actual significant background information. Very good book anyway. I think I have been meaning to read this for years. Have now been listening to a load of podcasts and archived talks and interviews with the author and other people talking about the book and related subjects.I think I will try to get hold of the updates on the subjects covered since they do seem to be in the library system.
Ed Yong An Immense WorldScience journalist looks at the Umwelt the world created by the senses and how this differs in various animals.. He makes the point that since these create the understanding that an animal lives in it would be very difficult to fully understand what it is like to exist as that animal. He references Thomas Nagel's essay What is it Like to Be A Bat which i had a similar take on in University 20 years ago which I think differed from how the lecturer was framing things. But I think this is very central to an understanding here , the basic understanding is down to one's experience of the world and since the filters of how one experiences the world are down to these senses it will be different without that being your basic experience. You can't visit temporarily and have the same experience and so on. Good book, have been enjoying podcasts and talks with the author too.I think I will need to read his book on microbes too.
Lydia Edwards How To Read A Suitgreat book on the development of men's clothing over about 400 years. This mainly concentrates on the suit as the title suggests. It wasa follow up to a book called How To Read A Dress by the same author. I need to read that one too. I heard about these books a few years ago on teh Dressed podcast. Glad i have read this now and now I have done i found out that I have a bit more time with it. I thought I was having to rush through to get i back for the next person in the library system queue. Not sure what happened there cos it was definitely reading as one copy in the system and one reserve.Anyway did give me a couple of things i want to adopt and utilise in things I'm making. & would love a further book on other aspects of the male wardrobe showing development over time.
Song of The Outcasts Robin Tottonbook on Flamenco that I've had out for too long without reading. Seems to have a lot of interesting info but I'm not 100% taken by the author's attitude to his subjects seems very very white gaze and quite patronising in places..But may be turning me onto some decent new stuff.
― Stevo, Thursday, 15 June 2023 11:22 (nine months ago) link
Having finished Caliban and The Witch this morning and got within a couple of chapters of An Immense World I thought I might just give Theodore Allen The iNvention of The White Race another batch.Sp I picked up from where i put it down last time I was trying to read it then went back to the beginning of the section. I've just read the beginning of the section on the colonisation of Ireland and the restructuring of the power structure and land ownership. It is already peppered with reference numbers and i watched a tv appearance or heard a podcast referring to the amount of endnotes. It said 35% but it occurred to me earlier that I wasn't sure what that statistic referred to . I have the first of 2 sections which have more recently been omnibused together by Verso. I couldn't wait another few months to get hold of it when I bought it then left it unread for 2 or 3 years. Have meant to get back to it but it has been a couple of years where I have had several books on the go at almost all times. Hoping I will get through this this time and then read the 2nd Volume when I get a chance to. Not sure if 35% was across the 2 volumes. Seem to be a number of citations but also a couple of things that have been half a page long.Anyway seems to be a good book that I hope i am going to fully ingest. Have heard quite a bit about it and probably have done a lot of reading that touches on this and will help- flesh out understandings better since I started trying to read it.
― Stevo, Thursday, 15 June 2023 19:47 (nine months ago) link
I finished RHAPSODY IN STEPHEN'S GREEN. It contains a lot of interesting material, and the voice of the human Tramp is very amusing. The satire of Loyalists and war in the third Act is bold, if crude.
I returned to O'Casey's play COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY. This is truly strange. It has almost no continuity of character, motivation or causality. People keep acting normally, then bonkers things happen, including a massive cock rampaging around the countryside causing havoc. It's played by an actor dressed up in a big cockerel outfit. Characters suddenly grow horns. Drink changes colour. You can't tell what's really going on or why. The most coherent thing to say about the play is that it's a critique of puritanism and misogyny, with a certain logic in all the women leaving at the end for a better life. But the play is mostly less coherent than this sounds.
― the pinefox, Friday, 16 June 2023 07:34 (nine months ago) link
I then read three TV plays by Flann O'Brien, I think all from 1962: THE TIME FREDDIE RETIRED, FLIGHT and THE MAN WITH FOUR LEGS. To be frank none of them are special. FLIGHT feels unusual in being a comedy about air travel from that long-ago date. I'm not sure how often Flann O'Brien was on an aeroplane.
― the pinefox, Friday, 16 June 2023 08:31 (nine months ago) link
Monica Heisey's "Really Good Actually", a Toronto romcom thing. It's no Heartburn (the obvious influence) but it's very enjoyable.
― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 17 June 2023 00:12 (nine months ago) link
Also I picked up the complete Lorrie Moore collection for £1, which I'm quite pleased about.
― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, 17 June 2023 00:13 (nine months ago) link
I would be also!
Her new novel is published on Tuesday. Probably not for £1.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 17 June 2023 09:48 (nine months ago) link
Listening to Phoebe Judge reading Turn of the Screw. I had blessedly forgotten James's turgidity.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 17 June 2023 17:27 (nine months ago) link
After some weeks of hectic goings-on and lack of focus, I’m back in the swing. Finished Comitta’s The Nature Book and highly recommend it, especially to fans of Oulipo strategies. Also read Coolidge’s Mesh, which was not very interesting to me, perhaps because it consists of rather abstract poems that seem to be referencing traditional cis-hetero coitus, which frankly is just not my cuppa. Finished a Coolidge/Mayer collaboration, The Cave, which began interestingly enough but then sort of departed from its subject— a failed caving expedition— and became increasingly dull, even on Mayer’s end, which surprised me. Finished a chap by my mentor Kevin Killian on the fourth anniversary of his death, which was a nice way to mark the occasion. Finally, just completed the short novel SALMON by Sebastian Castillo, a very funny yet affecting fabulist bildungsroman. Now I’m on to Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine before heading to the bar for my shift. I’ve read Fontamara previously and loved it, excited to dive back into the poverty and socialist rancor of the Italian countryside.
― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Saturday, 17 June 2023 18:40 (nine months ago) link
Martin Hayes Shared NOtesfiddle virtuoso from Clare's memoir. Pretty good read, not sure if this is the style he arrives at absolutely naturally or not. Seems to be a pretty great read and if this is the first thing he's really written it has a nice tone to it. At the point I've reached he's gone through a few things that have messed him up pretty badly, drinking messing up his academic career, business investments that weren't as thoroughly researched as should have been and wound up backfiring meaning he is in considerable debt, a stupid physical competition backfiring on him badly. He has relocated to Chicago where some things are going right and some others are continuing to go awry which is having a deleterious effect on his state of mind. He has just formed a band with the player he's best known for playing with but the style isn't working as yet.Anyway pretty good read from an artist I really enjoy. His Peggy's Dream album is really worth hearing
― Stevo, Sunday, 18 June 2023 10:31 (nine months ago) link
I've started Sean O'Casey's play THE SILVER TASSIE.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 18 June 2023 11:04 (nine months ago) link
A few short books to end Spring:
Dario Fo - Francis, the Holy JesterAnne Serre - The Fool & Other Moral TalesPierre Michon - The Eleven
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 18 June 2023 20:36 (nine months ago) link
I remember Dario Fo's plays as turning up a lot in channel 4s early days
― Stevo, Monday, 19 June 2023 00:02 (nine months ago) link
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
― youn, Monday, 19 June 2023 14:51 (nine months ago) link
COMING SOON: An All-New & Improved WAYR thread for Summer 2023! Watch this space for details.
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 19 June 2023 16:51 (nine months ago) link
Announcing a new WAYR thread two decades in the making!
Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Wednesday, 21 June 2023 22:46 (nine months ago) link